Oops...paneer stir fry got eaten without pictures taken beforehand. It was a rare spring garden treat...snow peas, carrot, onion, pak choi, spinach, garlic, ginger, teriyaki-type sauce. Sprinkled sesame oil over the cubed paneer for awhile and it fried up a nice golden brown amidst the veggies with that nice sesame flavor...served over brown basmati rice.
So for the latest paneer made with milk infused with a bit of cumin/mint/black pepper...now on day 2 and 3 the flavor is a bit more muted than when I ate some freshly drained curd. On a blandness scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being the most bland, I'd rank it a 2. The question is how much more to add of what before it becomes too much. On this batch I used 1/8 teaspoon each of cumin and black pepper and 1/16 teaspoon of mint (because minty cheese does not sound very appealing to me, either). On future batches I would not add more mint, but this amount really does not taste minty at all, just "bright" (another taste tester who hates mint did not report that it tasted minty at all).
Infusing the milk with dried peppers such as anaheim or jalapeno sounds intriguing as well. I guess the take-home message for me is that it is possible to infuse the milk with some kind of flavor before making the cheese. In the past I have tried adding herbs and peppers to the drained curds of queso blanco and the resulting cheese tasted, well, like bland curds with separate flavors kind of mixed in. I much prefer the results from flavor infused milk. But I wonder if too much of anything will affect the chemistry of the milk that will also affect curd formation and texture.
Anyway, I had kind of given up on fresh bland cheeses but this infused flavor idea, new to me, makes me want to experiment around with them some more. Travis if you give it a try with peppers or whatever, I hope you will post your results here.
Paneer picture below (no I did not drop the cheese in the dirt; the dark specks are bits of ground pepper and mint flakes). And instead of the traditional pressing method I pressed it clothless in a basket mold just to do something different.