Sugar is secret ingredient in sweet and sour butter paneer

Sauce is perfect mix of complex flavors dancing on your tongue.

Here’s the best kind of cookbook moment: You open it, you see a recipe so appealing you have to make it, you try it, you love it, you add it to your repertoire.

Sometimes the dish is something you already know — maybe you’ve had it in restaurants many times but never thought you could (easily) make it (well) at home, and the recipe proves you wrong. Or sometimes it’s something you’ve never heard of, but wish you had, and making the recipe just confirms that feeling.

For me, this wonderfully simple path to butter paneer is a little bit of both, but also kind of neither. I had heard of butter paneer but never tried it, even though my husband and I eat Indian food at least once a week. At our favorite two places, his go-to to-go order (say that five times fast) is butter chicken, mine dal makhani. I’ve ordered saag paneer plenty of times, and paneer korma, too, but even though butter paneer is a popular restaurant dish, I’ve never seen it on the menu at these spots, even under its aliases paneer makhani and paneer butter masala. This probably means I need to broaden my list of regular Indian takeout spots.

Now that Vina Patel has taught me how to make the dish, thanks to her cookbook “From Gujarat With Love,” do I even need to order it from a restaurant?

Probably not. Cooking it at home is just a matter of pureeing cashews with water, then simmering pan-fried paneer cubes in a sauce of the cashews, tomato puree, spices, butter and a touch of cream. The sauce is nothing short of beautiful, a perfect marriage of complex flavors that dance on your tongue. And even though the dish didn’t originate in Gujarat, the western Indian state where Patel is from, it shows off one of the principles of Gujarati cooking: “Our food is spicy, sweet and sour,”

Patel says in a phone interview from her home in Saratoga, California. “We add sugar into each and every dish, and it really balances out the sour taste.”

In this case, it’s just a teaspoon, and even though I know I’ll hear about it from readers who hate to see even a pinch in anything, I stand by its place in this sauce. If you’re skeptical, make the sauce without it, taste, then add the sugar and taste the difference. I think you’ll agree, but if you don’t, you know what to do next time.

Ultimately, when you make anything yourself, you can customize, of course. That means vegan butter (I prefer Miyoko’s) and a nondairy cream alternative (look for

Silk), if you follow a strictly plant-based diet, but what about the main ingredient?

When I asked Patel about substituting extra-firm tofu for the paneer, she tried it herself and reported that, while she doesn’t like it nearly as well as the paneer, it’s certainly suitable for any vegan cooks. Try asking for that in a restaurant!