I grew up eating chappathis daily. In the Mavoor Road home, it was a staple. Twenty odd years ago, I decided to stop making chappathis. I hated everything about it - dough making, bits getting stuck in my nails, flour on the counter tops, rolling and cooking chappathis.
Then COVID-19 happened. My sister decided that chappathi making is a necessary life skill. She put together a recipe and WhatsApped it off to her son and my son. She told me that our simple, everyday, recipes need to be blogged. Especially chappathis. Bread can run out, she pronounced. People need to know how to make chappathis.
Two decades of no chappathis, and I made them every day during Ramadan 2020. Dough was made in a food processor. Rolling them out was always the easiest part. Thank you Zeenath for rekindling this basic skill.
Ingredients
2 cups of wheat flour
1 cup of water
Salt to taste
Oil
If mixing by hand, add salt to taste, make a well in the flour, pour in 3/4 cup of water and blend it in with a fork. Slowly add the rest of the water and knead to make a firm dough.
I put all the ingredients into a food processor with a dough hook/blade and blend till the dough forms into a rough ball and starts to clear the sides of the mixing bowl. Transfer dough to a lightly floured surface and knead by hand until dough forms a smooth, round ball.
If the dough is too wet, add a bit of flour.
Do not over blend in the food processor. You will get a very pliant dough, and need to add lots of flour to the chappathis, while rolling them out, resulting in poor texture chappathis.
Let the dough sit for a half hour, in a covered bowl, before making the chappathis. It helps the flour abosorb the water, making the dough easier to work with. If pressed for time, this step can be skipped.
2 cups of flour will make about 8 chappathis. Make 8 balls of dough.
Coat a dough ball with some flour, roll into a circle, adding more flour as necessary while rolling. Brush some oil into the centre of the circle. Fold over as shown in the pictures below.
Flip over from the last picture and fold over one last time to form a little square.
Repeat for all the dough balls.
Start rolling out the folded squares into chappathis (that's how Umma made them - squares), using flour when necessary.
Heat a flat bottomed pan. I use a non stick skillet. Heat pan to medium to high heat. The pan needs to be heated to this level before you put the the chappathi in.
Wait for bubbles to form. This can look anything like the pictures below.
Or like this.
After bubbles form, turn the chappathi over. Use spatula to press it down on the other side to encourage it to puff up nicely. This could look anything like this, with an ideal chappathi puffing up like a pillow, as seen in the last picture.
Start to work fast now. Drizzle a few drops of oil on the chappathi. Turn over, drizzle a few drops of oil on the other side, press down with spatula, flip over quickly, press down with spatula and remove from the pan. Modulate heat if necessary so that you don't get large brown patches on the chappathi as in one of the pictures above. This makes the chappathi dry and crispy.
Transfer to a container and close the container. Or wrap in a clean towel or kitchen roll and put that into a closed container.
Chappathis are delicious to eat with meat curry, or dal or channa masala or indeed any curry.
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