Palak Paneer Kofta Recipe

Two days before Bandi Chhor Divas, the lane outside my friend's house in Amritsar already smelled of mustard oil, fresh paint and frying batter. Her family had whitewashed the front wall, a basket of red clay diyas sat on the stairs, and on the kitchen counter, tied with a rubber band like a bouquet, lay four fat bunches of palak. Her dadi looked at the spinach, looked at me, and asked what I planned to do with it. I said I wanted to make Shaam Savera, the dish Sanjeev Kapoor made famous. She said she had eaten it at weddings but never watched it being made in a home kitchen. That one sentence started a long, loud and delicious afternoon, and this recipe is what came out of it.

The lane before the lamps

Amritsar in the weeks around Diwali has a particular light. Mornings arrive cool and pale, shawl weather, and by four in the afternoon the sky turns the colour of weak tea stirred with jaggery. In the lanes near my friend's home, shopkeepers were stacking boxes of mithai up to the ceiling, women haggled over marigold garlands, and boys carried trays of unlit diyas as carefully as if they held sleeping babies.

Inside the house the festival had its own order. The aunties scrubbed brass degchis until you could see your face in them. Her chacha argued with the electrician about the strings of lights for the roof. The vehra, the open courtyard, was swept twice and then swept a third time by a small cousin who wanted credit. Mustard oil was being poured into clay lamps, and the smell, sharp and nutty, climbed up to the terrace and stayed there all evening.

Then there was the kitchen, a narrow room painted the yellow of a ripe lemon, where six people moved around one another without ever colliding, the way people do who have shared a kitchen for forty years. I was given a corner, a stool, and a brass kadhai with a dent on one side. Dadi sat on a low cane chair near the stove, directing everything without ever seeming to direct anything.

The afternoon I arrived, my friend took me through the walled city on foot, because that is the only way to meet it. We moved from lane to lane in a slow current of shoppers, and every few steps someone said the old saying aloud, Dal Roti Ghar Di, Diwali Ambarsar Di. The bazaars seemed to have taken it as an order.

In Khidoneyan Wala Bazaar, the lane that has long sold candied toys, shopkeepers stacked sugar candy figures in glass boxes, the kind that are set out for Lakshmi puja and handed to children afterwards. Mishri Bazaar glittered with rock sugar crystals the colour of weak amber. Bhadbhunjiyan Wala, the lane of the grain roasters, smelled of hot sand and puffed corn. Bhandiyan Wala was all clang, brass and steel utensils piled to the awnings, with women weighing a degchi in one hand and bargaining with the other. In the potters' lanes the diyas sat in red pyramids, hundreds to a heap, and a boy counted them aloud in Punjabi, fast, as though the numbers might escape.

We bought what the season asks for. Petha in white towers, ghee and dry fruit pinni, a box of laddoos the yellow of a ripe mango, and, because I insisted, four bunches of the greenest spinach the sabzi lane could offer. My friend's mother had told us to look for small leaves, dark and crisp, with stems thin enough to snap. Big floppy leaves, she said, are for cows and politicians. I have never bought a limp bunch since.

Dusk and dawn, on one plate

Shaam Savera is a young dish with an old sounding name. The idea is clever. A paneer ball goes inside a spinach shell, the kofta is fried, and then it is cut in half. The dark green outside is shaam, the dusk. The pale paneer inside is savera, the dawn. Nothing about the dish tells you this until the knife goes in, which is why I now cut the koftas at the table, in front of the people who are about to eat them.

Because it is a modern creation, I will not pretend it has a thousand year pedigree. What it does have is older relatives. Palak paneer is the obvious one. Older still is saag, which in Punjabi kitchens is less a single vegetable than a season. Saag means whatever greens the field is giving that week, mustard first, then spinach, bathua and methi as the cold deepens. Dadi told me her own mother never wrote a saag recipe down, because it changed with the weather. That is how a dish like this belongs to a festival. It takes the green of the field and dresses it for the night.

The dark shell is the dusk, the white centre is the dawn, and the knife is what lets you see both.

Chef Kapoor's original sits in a makhani gravy, and I kept that. Where I changed things, I say so below.

The long road of the green

A little history sits inside every bunch of spinach. Botanists place its home in and around ancient Persia. From there it moved east, and a Tang dynasty record from 647 notes that Nepal sent spinach to the Chinese court, in one Chinese account described as a vegetable from Buddha's soil. Picture a bunch of palak travelling as a diplomatic gift, centuries before anyone thought of wrapping it around paneer.

Paneer comes with a quarrel attached. Historians have argued for a Vedic beginning, for Persian and Afghan travellers carrying the method into the north west, and for Portuguese influence in Bengal in the seventeenth century. The word itself is Persian, panir, which simply means cheese. Nobody has settled the matter, and I rather enjoy that. It means every plate of palak paneer is a meeting of two travellers, a green from Persia and a milk curd with a disputed past, arriving together in a Punjabi kadhai.

The day of release

Bandi Chhor Divas means the day of release, and the story behind it is why the whole city glows. In 1619, according to Sikh tradition, Guru Hargobind, the sixth Guru, was freed from the Mughal fort at Gwalior. Emperor Jahangir was willing to let him go, but the Guru refused to walk out alone, because 52 princes were also held inside. Jahangir answered with a condition, that only those who could hold on to the Guru's cloak would go free. The Guru had a cloak made with 52 tassels, and every prince held one. All of them walked out together, and that is why he is remembered as Bandi Chhor, the one who frees the captives.

By tradition he reached Amritsar on the night people were already celebrating Diwali, and the city lit lamps for his return. Today Harmandir Sahib glows with thousands of lights on that night, the sky over it fills with fireworks, and shabads of Bhai Gurdas in praise of the Guru are sung. In Gwalior, Gurdwara Data Bandi Chhor Sahib stands where he was held. Sikh sources name Gurdwara Sri Chola Sahib at Ghudani Kalan in Punjab as the place where the Guru's robe is honoured.

For Sikh families this is not simply a second Diwali. It is its own remembrance, about courage and about refusing to leave others behind. I cooked as a guest in that house, and I tried to keep that in mind with every spoonful.

Legends the lamps remember

The version told in textbooks has one hero and one cloak. The version told in older kitchens has more people in it, and they are the reason I love the story.

Start with Hari Das, the governor of Gwalior fort. According to Sikh accounts, a rival at court named Chandu Shah wrote to him with orders to poison the Guru. Hari Das, who had become a devotee, handed the letter to the Guru instead of obeying it. Then there is Mian Mir, the Sufi saint of Lahore and a friend of the Guru's family, who travelled to the emperor's court and pleaded for the release. One telling gives the credit to Queen Nur Jahan instead, who is said to have convinced Jahangir that the Guru was held unjustly. The accounts disagree about who spoke last, and I find that more honest than troubling. Perhaps the Guru's freedom took many voices, a saint, a queen and a governor who disobeyed an order.

Then comes the condition. Jahangir said he would release as many princes as could walk out holding the Guru's clothing. The Guru had a robe stitched with 52 long tassels, 26 on each side in the tellings, and every prince took hold of one. The emperor's clever rule met a cleverer cloak. Another strand of the story, told in some Sikh retellings, recalls a hunt on which a lion charged at Jahangir and the Guru stepped in, an act said to explain how an emperor and a Guru had once been friends before suspicion came between them.

Gwalior keeps its own memory. Within the fort stands Gurdwara Data Bandi Chhor Sahib, and a marble platform near its entrance marks the original shrine. One account adds that a shrine of Bandi Chhor Pir was also kept there, where a Muslim faqir sat in remembrance, a small sign of how widely the Guru's act was honoured.

He would not walk out of the fort alone, and that is the whole festival in one sentence.

Diwali had a place in Sikh life long before 1619. The third Guru, Guru Amar Das, made Diwali one of the days when Sikhs gathered at Goindwal to receive the Guru's blessing. Tradition also says that the foundation stone of the Golden Temple was laid on Diwali day in 1577. Some accounts place the release a few days before Diwali, with the arrival in Amritsar on the festival night, and Sikh tradition says he was received the way Lord Rama was received. That is why two homecomings share one night of lamps.

The darker chapter is remembered too. In the late 1730s Bhai Mani Singh, the keeper of Harmandir Sahib, obtained permission from the Mughal governor of Lahore, Zakariya Khan, for a gathering of Sikhs at Amritsar on Bandi Chhor Divas, in return for a tax of 5000 rupees. He learned that the governor meant to attack the gathering, sent word to cancel it, and could not pay the tax. He was arrested and executed at Lahore. His sacrifice is recalled every year on this night, and I think of it whenever a plate is passed around a Sikh table with such ease. Some of that ease was paid for.

The customs themselves are simple and very old fashioned. Lamps fill gurdwaras and homes, once with mustard oil and cotton wicks in clay and now often with electric strings beside them. An Akhand Path, the unbroken reading of the Guru Granth Sahib, and a nagar kirtan through the streets mark the day. The vaars of Bhai Gurdas are sung in praise of Guru Hargobind, langar runs through the day, and the sky over Harmandir Sahib fills with fireworks. In Punjabi the name is also understood as a day of breaking from false bonds, a phrase I kept turning over while I stirred gravy.

In the kitchen, with the elders

The night before: roasting, grinding, waiting

The cooking began the night before, long after the market had gone quiet. Dadi believed in doing the dull work early, so that the lively work could be done in a good mood. At ten o'clock, with the courtyard dark and the diyas still stacked in their baskets, we roasted chana dal on a dry tawa until it smelled like toast and began to pop and jump. It cooled on a steel plate and went into the grinder in short bursts. A long grind warms the flour and turns it clumpy, she said, and warm flour is a sulky flour.

The cashews got the same patience, pulsed in quick bursts with a spoonful of the chana powder so they stayed a fine meal and did not slide into paste. When the cashews run out, Dadi says, melon seed powder does the same work, or one more spoon of chana flour, and the shell is only a little less rich. Someone made tea with ginger and crushed cardamom, strong and sweet, and the kitchen filled with the sound of spoons on steel glasses. Over the second cup Dadi told the story of Bhai Mani Singh, the keeper of Harmandir Sahib who tried to arrange a Bandi Chhor gathering under a tax he could not pay. My tea went cold in my hand. The grinder was off, the stove was off, and for a few minutes the room held nothing but the story.

Before bed she insisted on one more small ritual, which I would have skipped. The ground chana flour went into a dry pan for three minutes, stirred until it smelled of toasted nuts, and cooled on a plate. Toasting, she said, takes the raw bean taste out of the flour and teaches it to drink water, and a flour that drinks water is the best friend a wet spinach shell can have. The salt, she added, waits. It goes into the shell dough only at the moment of mixing, because salt pulls water out of spinach, and spinach salted early sits in its own puddle. By midnight the dry work was done, and I went to bed with flour on my elbows.

Dawn: grit, water and the first light

Dawn arrived with a radio somewhere playing kirtan from Darbar Sahib, thin and sweet over the rooftops, and with pigeons arguing on the water tank. On the terrace I washed the spinach in a wide steel tub, in four changes of water. The rule is to lift the leaves out with your hands and never pour the water through a sieve, because the grit has settled to the bottom and a sieve only pours it back over the leaves. By the fourth change the water ran clear, my fingers were numb and the leaves shone like wet lacquer.

In months when palak is poor, the family keeps frozen spinach in the freezer for exactly this dish. Dadi's rule for it is about 150 g, thawed and squeezed until it complains, then cooked dry in the ghee a minute longer than fresh. The colour is a shade duller, the taste is the same, and she forgives it.

Dadi's first instruction was about the spinach, and it was not gentle. She picked up a leaf, bent the stem and announced that it was bitter. Only the young leaves went into the bowl. The thick stalks went to a bucket meant for a neighbour's cow.

We blanched the leaves for about forty seconds in salted water and dropped them into a steel pot of iced water, and the green turned the shade of a parrot's wing. Then came the part that decides the whole dish. Her mother handed me a clean cotton napkin, the soft kind used to cover rotis, and told me to wring. I wrung. Dadi said harder. I wrung until my wrists complained and one last, reluctant tablespoon of green water ran into the bowl.

A shell that still holds water will open in the oil like a cracked pot, and no gravy can hide it.

There was a second rule about colour, which Dadi gave me as a warning and I understood only later as chemistry. Keep the spinach away from anything sour while it is hot. Heat and acid change the shape of chlorophyll, and bright green slides into olive, which is why a shell goes dull beside tomato, lemon or curd, and why ours never touched the gravy until the plate. A short blanch in salted water and a plunge into iced water fix the colour for good. A neighbour who dropped in for a glass of lassi said she adds a tiny pinch of baking soda to the blanching water for a brighter green. It does brighten the leaf, but it also softens it and can leave a faint soapy edge, so I leave it out. If you try it, one eighth of a teaspoon is the limit.

We chopped the spinach fine instead of grinding it. A puree turns slick and sticky, while fine chopping keeps a little texture and a sturdier shell. The smooth part belongs to the gravy. If shell and gravy are both smooth, the dish goes flat and everything melts into one note, so the chopped spinach gives the gentle bite and the gravy carries the velvet. Ghee went into the dented kadhai with ginger and green chilli, then the spinach, and we cooked it on a patient flame until it dried out and smelled sweet instead of grassy. Roasted chana flour went in to hold the shape, cashew powder for richness, and a spoon of cornflour for crackle. When the dough cooled it felt like soft clay and held a fingerprint.

The paneer had been bought that morning. We grated it and wrung it in muslin, because whey is the quiet enemy of every stuffed kofta. A spoon of malai, black pepper, fennel seeds roasted on a dry tawa and crushed, and chopped coriander went in. The fennel is my addition, and Dadi allowed it only after tasting a crumb.

Grating mattered. Dadi would not let me mash the paneer, because grated paneer keeps small curds that hold together under a little cornflour, while mashed paneer turns pasty and weeps whey. When her paneer runs a little dry, she told me, she folds in a spoonful of grated khoya or soft chhena, which makes the centre more tender.

Then came the small surprises. A pinch of freshly grated nutmeg went in, and sometimes a thread of saffron, which her family does to round off the taste of spinach without announcing itself. Into the heart of each paneer ball she pressed a thin sliver of ginger and a sliver of green chilli. Spinach is earthy on its own, and that hidden sliver gives a sudden bright bite when the kofta is cut.

On days when the dairy has run out, Dadi makes her own paneer. She brings 1 litre of full fat milk to a near boil, takes it off the heat and stirs in three tablespoons of lemon juice until the curds separate. It is drained through muslin, rinsed briefly under cold water and pressed under a heavy pan for 20 minutes. You get about 150 to 180 g, softer and sweeter than most packets.

The gravy came together while the dough rested. Butter, whole spices, onion, tomatoes and a handful of cashews cooked under a lid until they slumped, then went into the blender and through a sieve. Dadi added a pinch of saunth, dry ginger, and said it wakes up a tomato gravy in the cold months. I would never have thought of it. The kitchen smelled of butter, cardamom and sweet tomato, and somewhere in the next room someone began humming a shabad.

The sieve deserves a word. Dadi pressed the pulp through with the back of a ladle until nothing was left but velvet, then stirred in a cold cube of butter off the heat. This dish is judged by the eye first, and a seedless, mirror bright gravy makes the green and white halves look like jewels laid on silk.

Midday: the dough, the heat and my first mistake

By noon the sun had crossed the kitchen floor and the heat of the stove had soaked into everyone's temper. I have told you the clean version of the dough. Here is the true one. My first dough was a proud, hurried thing. I wrung the spinach politely, trusted my hands over the cloth, and announced that it was ready. Dadi pinched it, said nothing, and handed me the oil. My test kofta went in whole and came out in two pieces, the paneer drifting out of it like a small white cloud. The family, who had been pretending not to watch, burst out laughing. Her chacha said he had seen better koftas at a wedding after the third round of tea.

We began again. The spinach went back into the napkin and I wrung until my forearms shook. More chana flour went in, a teaspoon at a time, with the dough resting between spoons. Dadi's rule was to stop when the dough stopped sticking to the bowl and not one spoon later, because too much flour makes the shell dry and chalky. It took the whole second dough to understand that, and it was worth the lost hour.

Shaping was a team sport. Oiled palms, a flat disc of spinach dough, a ball of paneer in the middle, the edges drawn up and sealed with the care you give an envelope. The seam has to vanish. We chilled the koftas for fifteen minutes. Her chacha, who had wandered in to steal a piece of paneer, was put to work dusting them with cornflour and went away looking like a man who had been caught.

Frying is where the courage goes. Dadi's test was a pinch of dough dropped into the oil. If it sank and sulked, the oil was cold. If it shot up and browned in a blink, the oil was angry. We wanted it to rise in four to five seconds, with steady bubbles and no sudden browning, which on a thermometer reads 170 to 175 degrees Celsius, or 340 to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Colder oil makes greasy koftas that fall apart, and hotter oil burns the shell before the paneer warms. We fried one test kofta first. It held. Then we fried three at a time, turning them gently with a slotted spoon for four to five minutes, until the shell was crisp and a deeper green. They went onto a steel rack instead of paper, so the underside kept its crunch.

Heat the oil until it stops being shy, but never until it turns angry.

Late afternoon: smoke, visitors and the waiting

By four the whole house had caught the smell. Neighbours drifted in on small pretexts, a borrowed bowl, a question about extension wires, and every one of them paused at the kitchen door with the look of a person caught by an aroma. An aunt from next door tasted the gravy from the ladle, closed her eyes and added a pinch of salt without asking. Nobody objected. The oil smoked lightly and settled again as batch followed batch, and the racks filled with koftas the colour of wet moss.

While the koftas rested, the aunts began the argument every festival kitchen has, about what else the dish could become. One aunt makes a Holi version with three colours, spinach green, grated beetroot red and crushed raw turmeric yellow, each wrapped around a paneer centre and set together on one plate. Another, caught once without paneer, wraps boiled potato in the spinach and calls it a palak tikki in a kofta coat, and swears the green and white halves still show. A third drops fried spinach and besan dumplings into a yogurt kadhi just before serving, a different and comforting dish eaten with khichdi or ghee rice.

For fast days and temple meals, they said, skip the onion and garlic. Build the gravy on tomato, cashew, ginger and a pinch of hing, fry the cumin in ghee, and replace the garlic tadka with a dried chilli and crushed cumin in the ghee. My friend's cousin, who bakes everything, wanted her koftas without frying. She brushed them with oil and air fried them at 180 degrees Celsius for 10 to 12 minutes, turning once, and the shell came out softer with a gentler crust. Her first baked batch had stuck to the tray and torn when she turned them, because there was no oil in the mix and no oil on the tray. Baked koftas need a little oil in the mix and a well oiled tray or a silicone sheet, and they will never match the crust of fried ones. Shallow frying on medium heat, turning often, sits between the two.

The tofu question came from a guest who eats no dairy. Press firm tofu for 20 minutes, grate it and season it with extra pepper and a spoon of cashew powder. The centre is softer and less milky, but the cut half still shows two colours. As for the gravy, the makhani gives richness, an onion and tomato gravy makes a lighter plate, and a smooth spinach gravy gives a fully green plate with the halves peeking out of it.

The light came through the courtyard grille white, then honey, then a dusty orange, and the diyas were carried up to the parapet one tray at a time. In the kitchen we had reached the hour every festival cook knows, when the work is finished and the plates are not yet out, and all you can do is wait and keep the gravy warm. Dadi sat down at last. She took off her shawl, folded it on her knee and told me I had done well, in the plain way of someone who does not hand out praise often. I have kept that sentence longer than any recipe.

Serving at dusk

By five the terrace was strung with lights and the first diyas had been lit along the parapet, small flames leaning in the evening wind. We plated in the half dark of the kitchen. The gravy went down first, the colour of a marigold petal, glossy at the edges where the butter had separated. A wet, sharp knife halved each kofta, and the halves went on the gravy cut side up, the pale centre ringed by dark green. A thread of cream, a few strands of ginger, and that was all.

We carried the plates to the vehra, where a long cotton sheet had been spread. A small cousin pointed at the first sliced kofta and shouted shaam, then savera, then shaam again, until the whole family was laughing. Phulkas came hot from the tawa, with jeera rice, onion lachha with lime, a spoon of mango pickle and cold dahi. When the meal was done, karah parshad passed round in small steel bowls, made as it always is with equal parts whole wheat flour, ghee and sugar. Then the fireworks began, and no one talked for a while.

The last thing Dadi did before anyone lifted a spoon was heat a tablespoon of ghee in a small iron ladle, drop in thin slices of garlic and a dried red chilli, and pour the sizzling tadka over the first plate. The children gasped at the sound, and the smell of toasted garlic reached us before the taste did. That ladle of ghee is the finishing move in my own kitchen now.

After the lamps, after midnight

The fireworks came in waves. Children ran across the terrace with phuljharis, drawing bright circles that dissolved before they were finished, anars bloomed in the lane and chakris spun themselves into small whirlwinds on the cobbles. Beyond the old city the sky kept brightening in bursts, and under the noise I could hear kirtan from somewhere, steady as a pulse. Plates travelled across the parapets, a katori of kheer from one roof, a handful of pinni from another, and my friend's mother sent koftas to the neighbours and received a plate of something else before the first one had cooled.

It was past midnight when the last guest left. We scrubbed the brass under a single tube light, the dented kadhai last of all, and Dadi fell asleep in her cane chair with her hand still on the steel ladle. I carried the leftovers to the fridge, aware of the flour still caught at my elbows from the night before, the small burn on my thumb from the oil, and a tiredness so thoroughly earned that it felt like a second meal.

Dadi had rules for the leftovers too. The gravy keeps for two days in the fridge and up to two months in the freezer. Fried koftas keep for one day in the fridge and crisp up in an oven at 180 degrees Celsius for 6 to 8 minutes, though she never freezes them, because the shell loses its crunch. Halve and plate only at the last moment, always.

Over the washing up, someone asked how heavy all this was. My rough reckoning for one serving, two deep fried koftas with gravy, comes to about 430 calories. Brands of paneer and the oil the shell absorbs change that number, so take it as an estimate. Spinach is rich in oxalates, and blanching it and throwing away the water lowers the soluble part. If a doctor has told you to limit oxalates because of kidney stones, ask before making this a regular dish.

The next morning three koftas were left. We tore a phulka in half, laid the halved koftas inside with onion rings and green chutney, and ate standing in the courtyard among the burnt out diyas, which the same small cousin was already sweeping into a pile. That is the taste I remember best. A dish of two colours that needed each other, made in a house where, on that night, everyone was holding on to something.

What I changed from the Sanjeev Kapoor version

The idea belongs to him, and his gravy is what I followed. My changes were small and made for a home kitchen.

Fix it fast

I have met every one of these in a kadhai, mine or someone else's, and each has a quick repair.

The festival plate at a glance

Questions that reach me