(re-post)
More than forty years ago I made my first chapatti.
Little India – not Indiatown, don’t know why – in Toronto will do that to you. Hook you in and motivate you to go home and try it on your own. It’s only brown flour and water, you think. You’ve watched, often enough, in the restaurants, the rolling and cooking, the pressing and inflating.
Then India hooks you in with its colour and sound and smells and warmth and welcome and never quite lets you go. And you thought making chapattis on an electric stove in a kitchen in Toronto was satisfying. Then you make chapattis, outdoors, over a wood fire and the final stage is achieved by tossing the chapatti on the grill and it balloons into a globe.
Every so often I still make chapattis. On a stove, indoors …. but the window in the kitchen is open.
Flour and water, warm water, just so. A soft dough left to set for a bit. Formed into balls and rolled out, one by one, not too thick, not too thin, just so.
I recall hearing of a man who, when his daughter returned home to India from many years abroad and made chapattis, asked if she was making them in the shapes of all the countries she had visited. My sympathies are with the daughter.
You flop the just rolled chapatti back and forth between your hands to rid it of excess flour. Then you flop it on a hot pan. And begin to roll out the next chapatti while keeping an eye on the one on the stove. When it bubbles you flip it and see that it is freckled. Then back to the rolling until the freckles start to puff, here and there. Now is the time for a dry cloth and encouragant pressing. Air is inside the chapatti, hot air, and the quest is to get that hot air to inflate the round, well – roundish, chapatti and cook the inside.
Add to stack. Butter.
Chapattis are both the bread and the utensil. You learn how to break off a suitably-sized piece with the fingers of your right hand (I don’t recall ever seeing anyone use a left hand), make a scoop, pick up some food, convey to mouth; keeping the fingers neat and clean above the first knuckle.
One of my most favourite things to do with a leftover chapatti is to heat it up in a toaster oven, add a bud or two of more butter, roll it around either a spring onion or a spear of asparagus just picked in the garden. Eat it in the garden.