The Best Way to Soften Store-Bought Paneer

There are two kinds of disappointment in the kitchen. One is when you know your subpar dinner is your own fault, and had you taken just a little more care you wouldn’t be choking down such an unsatisfying meal. The other is when the problem lies with subpar ingredients that fail to be what you know they could and should. I have experienced this at times with store-bought paneer, a convenience product that too often cooks up hard and rubbery. It’s especially jarring if you’ve ever eaten good quality, freshly made paneer and know just how wonderfully milky and light it can be.

But does that mean we have to either accept chewy nubs of refrigerator-aisle cheese or make paneer from scratch? Is there nothing we can do to transform store-bought paneer back to a better version of itself? You know the answer is that we can. But before I tell you how, let’s find out why this happens in the first place.

The Science of Rubbery Paneer

Paneer is a fresh cheese made not with rennet but by acidifying milk with a sour ingredient like lemon or lime juice. The result is essentially a casein-whey protein complex with fat, moisture, lactose, and minerals trapped inside. In India, buffalo milk is traditionally used to make paneer (similar to traditional Italian mozzarella), and the resulting paneer is softer, spongier and more porous than paneer made from cow’s milk. That’s because buffalo milk has almost double the fat of cow’s milk (7-8% vs 3-4%, respectively), and fat matters.

When the milk is coagulated using the sour agent, it causes proteins in the milk to bond. But fat can interfere with the strength of those bonds, and the more fat there is, the less strongly the proteins bond. In practice, what that means is higher fat equals softer mouthfeel. In the US, buffalo milk is not widely available.

Right away we have our first and biggest problem. Because the majority of the paneer sold in retail stores in the United States uses cow’s milk, the resulting paneer does not have that same soft, rich texture. If you are able to find paneer that states “100% buffalo milk” on its packaging, it is going to be a much better quality than other normal supermarket brands. In addition to the fat content of the paneer, other factors can also influence the texture of the resultant paneer. When paneer is made, it is pressed to expel excess liquid, but the temperature at which the curds are compressed, the pressure applied, and the time allotted for pressing the paneer can all contribute to an even drier, firmer paneer. These are not factors the consumer has control over, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do something to make it better.

How to Soften Store-Bought Paneer

The first thing you’ll want to determine is whether your paneer needs to be soaked at all. Generally speaking, any store-bought paneer made from cow’s milk will benefit from being soaked, but even some store-bought buffalo milk paneer can use some softening. One easy way to tell is if the paneer offers noticeable resistance when cut or bitten; if it does, consider soaking it.

Many people say that the best way to do this is by soaking it in warm water before adding it to a dish, the idea being that the paneer will absorb water and soften as a consequence. But does this work—does the paneer actually absorb water? To find out, I experimented by soaking different packets of store-bought paneer in cool water, hot water, and for different intervals of time from 15 minutes up to overnight in the refrigerator, and then documented the changes in their weight to see if they absorbed water, and if so, how much.

Overall, I measured only about a 2% increase in the weight of the paneer after a full hour of soaking. If left overnight, I recorded at most a 4% increase in mass—an improvement, but not a remarkable one.

In a couple of instances, the weight actually dropped by one gram. I was surprised by this, and have concluded that it’s either the result of a weighing error due to the resolution of my scale, or syneresis (the water released by cheese) when there is a change in temperature. Submerging the paneer in hot water, I should note, did make the paneer feel more flexible compared to the cold, refrigerated version; however, here again, the increase in moisture content was minimal.