Crispy Paneer Tikka with Charred Peppers and Raita
Spiced, smoky paneer with a cooling minted yoghurt
Paneer tikka is a thing of real beauty when it is done well: cubes of fresh cheese armoured in a spiced yoghurt crust, blistered and charred at the edges, with sweet peppers and onion catching the same heat. The trouble is that paneer can turn squeaky and dry, and the marinade often slides off into a sad puddle. My one small twist is to toast a spoonful of gram flour into the marinade, which thickens it into a paste that grips the cheese and crisps into a genuinely crunchy shell. Paired with a cooling minted cucumber raita, it is one of the best things you can make from a humble block of paneer.
Crispy Paneer Tikka with Charred Peppers and Raita
Ingredients
- 400g paneer, cut into 3cm cubes
- 1 red pepper, cut into chunks
- 1 yellow pepper, cut into chunks
- 1 red onion, cut into wedges
- 150g thick Greek yoghurt
- 2 tbsp gram (chickpea) flour
- 1 tbsp ginger-garlic paste
- 1 tsp Kashmiri chilli powder
- 1 tsp ground cumin
- 1 tsp garam masala
- 1/2 tsp ground turmeric
- 1 tbsp lemon juice
- 2 tbsp neutral oil, plus extra for grilling
- Salt, to taste
- For the raita: 200g thick yoghurt, 1/4 cucumber grated and squeezed, 2 tbsp chopped mint, 1/2 tsp toasted cumin, pinch of salt
Method
- Toast the gram flour in a dry pan over a low heat for 2 to 3 minutes until nutty and slightly darker, then cool.
- Whisk the toasted flour with the yoghurt, ginger-garlic paste, chilli powder, cumin, garam masala, turmeric, lemon juice, oil and salt into a thick paste.
- Fold in the paneer, peppers and onion to coat, then cover and marinate for at least 20 minutes.
- Thread the paneer, peppers and onion onto skewers, soaking wooden skewers first.
- Brush the skewers with oil and cook on a high griddle, barbecue or grill for 10 to 12 minutes, turning, until charred in patches.
- Make the raita by stirring the squeezed cucumber, mint, toasted cumin and salt through the yoghurt.
- Pile the skewers onto a platter, squeeze over a little lemon and serve hot with the cool raita.
3 The Story
Paneer tikka belongs to the great family of tikka dishes, where bite-sized pieces of meat, cheese or vegetable are marinated in spiced yoghurt and cooked over fierce heat in a tandoor. The tandoor, a clay oven fired to ferocious temperatures, is the soul of north Indian and Punjabi cooking, and it lends these dishes their signature smoky char and the slight bitterness that makes them so addictive. Paneer, the fresh, unaged cheese that does not melt, became the natural vegetarian counterpart to chicken tikka, beloved across India and far beyond as a starter, a party food and a filling for wraps and rolls.
The genius of the yoghurt marinade is twofold. Its mild acidity tenderises and seasons, while its body lets the spices cling to whatever they coat. For paneer this matters even more than for meat, because the cheese has a smooth, almost slippery surface that other marinades struggle to hold. This is exactly the problem the gram flour solves. Besan, as it is known on the subcontinent, is a fixture of Indian cooking, and toasting it briefly drives off its raw, beany taste and brings out a warm, nutty aroma. Stirred into the yoghurt, it thickens the marinade into a clinging paste and, crucially, browns and crisps under high heat into the kind of crust you usually only get from deep frying.
Kashmiri chilli powder is worth seeking out for this. It is prized less for fierce heat than for its deep, glowing red colour, which gives tikka its characteristic ruddy hue without setting your mouth alight. If you only have ordinary chilli powder, use rather less and add a little paprika to make up the colour. The other key to good char is high, dry heat: a smoking griddle pan, a hot barbecue or the top setting of your grill. You want the edges to blacken in places, because that bitterness is part of the flavour, while the inside stays soft and yielding.
The raita is not an afterthought but the other half of the dish. Cool, minty and faintly cumin-scented, it tempers the spice and richness and turns each mouthful into a contrast of hot and cold, charred and fresh. Squeezing the grated cucumber properly is the one step people skip and then wonder why their raita is watery; a good handful of liquid will come out, and your sauce will be all the better for losing it.
4 Getting the Char Right
If there is one obstacle between a home cook and great tikka, it is heat, or rather the lack of it. Without a tandoor, most of us are working with a domestic grill or hob that struggles to reach the temperatures a restaurant takes for granted, and the temptation is to leave the skewers under a gentle flame until they dry out without ever blistering. The answer is to commit fully: get a griddle pan smoking hot before the paneer goes anywhere near it, work in batches so you never crowd and cool the pan, and resist the urge to fiddle, turning each skewer only when it lifts cleanly from the metal. A few minutes of patience buys you those prized black-edged patches.
For an even closer approximation of tandoor smoke, there is an old Indian trick worth knowing. Once the skewers are cooked, set them in a bowl, place a small heatproof dish in the middle, drop in a glowing piece of lump charcoal and spoon a little ghee over it. As it sizzles and smokes, cover the bowl tightly for a couple of minutes and let the smoke perfume the paneer. It is theatrical and entirely optional, but it conjures the unmistakable aroma of food cooked over fire in a way no oven quite manages.
Beyond technique, treat this recipe as a starting point. Swap in chunks of mushroom or cauliflower, add a pinch of dried fenugreek leaves to the marinade for that unmistakable curry-house aroma, or finish the cooked skewers with a dusting of chaat masala for a sour, tangy lift. However you serve it, it is generous, vivid food that makes a vegetable cheese the unquestioned star of the table.
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