Roti (Step-By-Step)

Today was a bread day. In the oven, I had a no-knead whole-wheat oatmeal flaxseed loaf, and on the stovetop I made rotis. Or roti. I'm not quite sure of the plural. At any rate by the time I was done there were twelve of them, and I took pictures at every step of the way!

This is the oatmeal flaxseed whole-wheat no-knead Mark Bittman magic bread that I make every week. Has nothing to do with the roti(s) but I do like playing with my camera. ^__^

So this is all you need to make roti(s). 2 cups whole-wheat flour and 2 cups water. Jaffrey says you can cut the whole wheat with cake flour for a lighter roti, but... well, if I wanted to make a cake, I'd make one. (She also says I can use 100% chapati flour if I prefer, but if I wanted to make a chapati... *__^)

Notice what's missing, too. No ghee, and no oil. Not even for the cooking part. This bread is probably even healthier than the Bittman one.

So. Slowly mix water into flour, knead for 5-10 minutes or until it forms a smooth ball, let sit for 1/2 hour.

Once again it looks exactly the same, but I'm sure science has done something in the meanwhile.

Divide the dough into 12 equal pieces. You probably didn't need to see the picture of this step, but I like playing with my camera. ^__^

Dip the roti balls in flour until they are completely covered. It took me a few rotis to figure out why this was important. Trust me--it's important.

It's important because without any ghee/oil, there's nothing to keep the dough from sticking to every available surface as you roll it out.

Oh, and yes, my rolling pin is made from an old Snapple bottle. Food isn't the only thing we don't waste in this house...

Slap the roti onto an ungreased frying pan (I liked the slapping part), let it cook for about a minute, flip it over (Jaffrey says "it works best if you use your fingers" and so I dutifully did, although it does burn a little) and let it cook for another minute.

And that's all.

Roti(s) are so easy. Unbelievably so. And so tasty. And there's no oil. And--probably because I wasn't substituting whole wheat for white flour or olive oil for ghee (in fact, I didn't have to substitute anything for anything)--they tasted right. I could see myself whipping out a dozen of these every week or so.

Sorry, Bittman Bread. I have a new favorite now.

Strange Loops and Samosas (Step-By-Step)

I've been thinking about Douglas Hofstadter and his twenty-seven-year-old Pulitzer-Prize-winning treatise on recursive mathematical properties and their paradoxes. And it's thinking like that that makes my jumbled pile of person think that I should be working on my seminal work... whatever that may be.

But... I sat down and considered for a moment that it took me ten years of writing half-finished, short-sheeted novels before my consciousness generated the story that would, in fact, become a novel; ten years after that and I haven't been able to recreate the experience. (Lots of short sheets, though.)

So I sat for a while with my book this afternoon and puzzled how I could possibly ever get it revised and published, or if I even wanted to, or if I should use the power of the internet to push my characters off into the cloud for viral consumption. (It doesn't help that the only copy of said book is in paper; it was written on way-too-old technology and before it can go anywhere will need to be all-three-hundred-pages retyped.)

I even read the first chapter aloud, into my audio recording software, to hear how it sounded.

And then I got discouraged.

And then I made samosas. ^__^

1 1/2 cups flour, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 4 tablespoons ghee/oil. Mix with your fingers until it looks like "thick breadcrumbs."

Add one tablespoon of water at a time and slowly knead until the dough forms a ball. (You'll need between 4-6 tablespoons.) This is the hard part because you've got both hands in the dough and you've got to stop, turn on the sink, stick the tablespoon under the water, turn off the sink, dump the tablespoon of water into the dough, and try not to notice how covered with flour your kitchen is getting. ^__^

(Probably next time should fill up measuring cup with 1/4 cup water beforehand and pour it on the dough in increments.)

Here's the dough after it has sat, covered, for the requisite 1/2 hour. In honor of Douglas Hofstadter I added the recursive feedback loop in the background. ^__^

I am still not sure what happens to the dough in that mysterious half hour between kneading and rolling out. For all intents and purposes it appears exactly the same. Is it a science thing?

Here's the leftover aloo paratha stuffing from this weekend, to which I have added the necessary peas.

I guess I skipped the photo of the step where I cut the ball of dough into eight pieces and roll each piece out into a circle. At this point I've cut the slit in the circle of samosa dough and folded over on itself to make the "cone." That's not exactly a cone, as you can see. The dough is pretty limp, so I have to help it out.

I have no idea how this picture turned out so interesting. Didn't know my camera could do that. ^__^

As you can see, they are closed before I put them into the oven. I don't know why some of them choose not to stay that way.

Also, I think I need to work on my samosa-shaping. Proper samosas are shaped like tetrahedrons, equilateral on all sides, and they have that ridge down the one side. Like this:

(Wikipedia.)

Nine happy samosas, after baking. They really are delicious, even if they aren't perfectly tetrahedral.

This samosa is ready for its closeup. It is also ready for some constructive criticism. I know that using white flour and deep-frying would make a difference, but... is there a way to make better samosas even when baking them?

And here they are on the plate, along with yogurt, the chutney powder that I seem to be putting on everything these days, and the mattar black beans. What's that stuff on the beans, you ask? It's the cheddar cheese that melted in the frying pan yesterday. I let it sit on my cutting board until it chilled and then I cut it into smaller pieces and put it back in the refrigerator. IN THIS HOUSE WE DO NOT WASTE FOOD. ^__^ (Especially expensive Farmers' Market cheddar from happy cows.)

Aloo Parathas, Step-By-Step

Since I had so much fun with the last "step-by-step" cooking experiment, I thought I'd do another one. This time: aloo parathas. (Mostly because I had an extra potato.) Recipe comes from Jaffrey's World-of-the-East Vegetarian, obvs. ^__^

I should warn you ahead of time that these parathas took nearly two hours, start-to-finish, to make. And the kitchen was a mess afterwards. But they were well worth it.

2 cups flour, 1/2 teaspoon or so of salt, 2 tablespoons oil, 2 cups water. Mix and knead until it forms a ball. We should notice right away that these parathas require considerably less oil than the "delicious, flaky" ones. I'm all for that. In fact, except for greasing the pan that's all the oil we'll need for the entire process; there's no "rub the ball with oil" or "rub the parathas with oil" or anything like that. Oh, and Jaffrey says we can use ordinary veg/canola/olive oil for this one; no need to haul out the ghee. Clearly these parathas are much less high-maintenance.

Here's the potato.

The ball of dough is supposed to sit, covered, for at least 1/2 hour. I'm not sure why. It doesn't feel any different, in terms of texture or heft or malleability, after it's sat. I'm suspicious that it may have less to do with the dough itself than that it gives you a 1/2 hour block in which to cook up the potatoes. Let's see... chop, boil, drain, mash, use the Magic Bullet to grind up a masala of fresh ginger, green chili, garam masala, cumin, and coriander seed, add masala to the mash. Let it cool so it won't burn your fingers when you add it to the parathas.

Uncover the paratha ball-of-dough, divide into eight parts. Roll each part out into a palm-sized circle. Put a small spoonful of potato mix into the circle.

Bring the edges of the circle together and twist them so they close over the potato mix. Unlike my samosa experiments, this dough actually made a seal when I did this. No idea why. (Maybe the oil-flour-water ratio???)

Gently press down on the top of the filled paratha with the heel of your hand until it begins to flatten.

Then roll it out. These will be approximately 6 inches in diameter. What's really cool is at this point you can feel that there is, in fact a potato mixture inside there, surrounded by a thin layer of dough, but the dough seams are completely gone.

Be careful not to roll it too thin, or you'll squeeze the potato out.

Heat up the pan and put just enough oil in to keep the thing from sticking. This was the hardest part of the whole process. Too much oil and the parathas never developed tasty brown spots; too little oil and my smoke alarm went off. Cook on both sides until they look like the one in the picture.

Freeze the ones you don't use and eat the rest!

And now, a note about the other dish in the picture. It's a little embarrassing. See... um... back when I tried to microwave my Farmers' Market cheddar cheese and realized I couldn't get it to melt in the microwave (low oil content), I thought "ooh, then I can use it in recipes instead of paneer!" (This is again because there's nowhere I can buy paneer in a 60-mile radius, and the stock I bought in January has run out.)

I pulled out the recipe for mattar paneer and found out, to my unfortunate surprise, that Farmers' Market cheddar does in fact melt when it's put into a frying pan. In fact, it melts almost instantly. So I hauled it out of the pan and decided to replace it with canned black beans since it was the quickest protein I had on hand.

But there was a problem. Canned black beans come in their own goo, and I did not want all that brown goo to pollute my pretty red-and-green dish; I was going to take a picture of it, after all! So here I am in my kitchen, tomatoes and peas bubbling in their ginger sauce on one burner, a paratha activating my smoke alarm on the other burner, a glopful of melted cheddar cheese on the counter, and I'm rinsing off canned black beans in the sink, a handful at a time, letting the water run through my fingers until it ran clear.

I'd do a handful, throw them into the mattar mix, flip a paratha, and then rinse another handful. (In hindsight I should have just gotten out the colander.) But those black beans did not turn the dish brown! (I also would not recommend recreating the mattar black bean recipe; it doesn't taste awful or anything but it's not the kind of thing one would want to cook on purpose. The beans are way too heavy for the spices.)

Here Come The Paratha One Two Threes!

This whole project came about just because I didn't want to schlep.

See, the closest desi grocery requires both the Metro and a bus. At the same time I was tired of not having parathas and rotis to go with all the dal I was cooking up. The one time I did schlep out to the desi grocery, I bought all of these frozen breads and pickles and each meal, for a while, had dal/rice/bread/pickle/curd just like a complete meal should.

Then the breads ran out, and eventually the pickles ran out too, and there I was, trying to plan out another lengthy trip.

And then I thought "But all of those frozen Indian breads at the desi grocery are pre-packaged and probably full of preservatives. It would be so much healthier if I could make my own..."

So I sat down with my cookbook and analyzed the bread possibilities. Pooris were out because of the whole "open flame" thing; I could all-too-easily imagine myself setting my kitchen on fire. The "how to make naan without a tandoor" looked interesting, but I had no white flour on hand.

Then I read the recipe titled "Delicious, Flaky Parathas."

I think I'm a sucker for recipes with the word "delicious" in the title. The roti recipe, after all, was just called "Roti." So of course I picked the paratha recipe--and as a bonus for all of you devoted readers, photo-journaled every step.

Here we go!

Mix 3 cups white flour with 1/2 whole wheat flour and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Add 5 tablespoons melted ghee and mix until it looks like coarse breadcrumbs. (I used 3 1/2 cups whole wheat flour because I had no white flour; olive oil because I had no ghee.)

Add 1 cup water and knead until the dough forms a ball. (I used 2 cups because whole wheat flour needs more water than white.) Rub ball with ghee and let sit for 1/2 hour.

Divide dough into six equal parts; roll each part out flat, then roll the flat part into a tube, then coil the tube up like a snake, then rub the coil with ghee. (Does that make sense?) Cover and let sit overnight.

The next day, roll out the coils into parathas. Heat up your largest pan, pour out some oil, and cook, flipping occasionally, until both sides are bubbly and brown.

Like this!


Madhur Jaffrey says a serving size is 1/4 paratha. I cut mine into thirds instead, stacked them all in-between layers of foil, and fit them in the freezer next to samosas, dal, soup, and cabbage.


Except for the one piece, of course, which I ate for dinner. ^__^

How did the parathas fare? I didn't miss the white flour, but I did miss the ghee. Oil is oil is oil in terms of its ability to create brown bubbles on a piece of bread, but I think we'll all agree that ghee tastes different than olive oil, and it was this difference that showed up after the whole thing was done.

I mean, the thing turned out fine, it tastes good, it's both flaky and delicious, but it doesn't taste right.

Which means that in a few days you should see a post about me trying to clarify my own butter. ^__^