Rolling out the Roti

Finally learned how to make roti (chapatti) today!! These small, flat breads, like whole wheat tortillas are served with every meal. I’ve been yearning to learn how to cook some Indian food, but whenever I’m in the kitchen and offer to help out, the efficient women who are rolling out roti, throwing them onto the skillet and then turning them over the fire, brush me out of the way. Months ago, when I was first allowed to roll out a roti, it looked more like an oddly-shaped continent than a disc, so the rolling pin was quickly taken away from me. The two women who have cooked in the GRAVIS kitchen while I’ve been here, Ringku Ji and Lila Ji, have made so many thousands of rotis in their lives that there’s no time to teach a clumsy newcomer when there are hungry staff to be fed. But Ringku Ji has been working upstairs and Lila Ji has gone home for a couple weeks, so the kitchen’s been left to a couple of the men and me. The men do most of the cooking, and Prem Ji, a GRAVIS driver makes subzi (fried vegetable dish) so good that I can’t tell it apart from his wife’s.

This Sunday, after spending a relaxing morning talking with Emily and Joey on the phone and planning lovely adventures, I headed to the kitchen around noon and found Prem Ji just starting to cut up okra. (I’ve never liked okra before, always found it such a slimy, scaly vegetable, but I’ve found that when it’s cooked right it’s actually pretty tasty). So, seeing Prem just starting to prepare lunch, I fell into crushing garlic, cutting tomatoes and doing other prep work so that he could combine it all over the stove in what seemed like bucket-fulls of sizzling ghee (Indian butter).

Then it was time for the roti. Sifting the whole wheat flour, Prem threw in some water and started kneading. He punched and worked the dough. When it was sufficiently combined, he took a handful of dough, rolled it into a ball, covered it in flour, rolled it out into a nice disc, spread a couple drops of ghee on top, folded the disc in half and then half again so that the disc now the quarter of a circle, rolled it out again into an equilateral triangle, tossed it on to the skillet, lathered it with ghee, waited until it was brown, flipped it and voila! Done! Rotis are usually always round, so when he got to the stage of rolling it into a triangle, I asked in my few words of Hindi, “Yeh kya he? (What is this?)”. He just laughed and I could tell that he was just having fun making unusual roti, even though it added a few extra steps. It was like when I was a little kid and helping my mom make pancakes into the shape of Mickey Mouse.

Seeing that Prem didn’t mind making roti that differed from the perfectly round kind, I boldly grabbed a handful of dough myself. The first triangle was obtuse and the edges were squiggly, but after that I learned how to roll evenly and get the dough going in the right direction. I could even make discs with no problem! I would pat out the dough and roll it out, Prem would fry them, and we turned out a stack of buttery, toasting hot triangles.

When I get back home I can’t wait to try it out. The ingredients are simple: whole wheat flour and water, a little salt and ghee (or butter) if you want and that’s it! The most challenging part will be finding a thin cast iron skillet for the purpose, but maybe I’ll be able to find one for tortilla making.
Mom- next time we cook a big Indian feast together, I’ll make the roti.

(Correction: After excitedly telling my co-worker, Anurag Ji, this story later in the day, he informed me that we had actually been making parantha, not roti. Parantha are fried with ghee while roti are cooked dry. All the parantha I have seen, however, have been round as roti. Sometimes they are stuffed with mashed potatoes and spices; mint adds an especially good flavor. Often they are left plain like the ones we made.)

Yogurt’s also not that difficult. While I haven’t actually made it myself yet, I’ve seen it being made. Here’s how: Take some whole milk, boil it, let it cool until it’s luke warm, add a spoonful of already made yogurt (it contains the live cultures / bacteria that will multiply in the milk, changing the consistency and taste until it turns into yogurt), cover the bowl, keep it over night in a warm but not hot place, and in the morning you’ve got yogurt. My friend Ruchi says she used to put the bowl of milk in a tea cozy and let it sit in the turned off oven over night, because it was slightly warmer there. Here the desert there’s no need to make the milk any warmer, so leaving it out is best. Basically you just want a comfortable temperature for growing this good kind of bacteria. What I’m wondering is: who made that first yogurt that has given life to all the rest of it, since you always need a starter culture.