I am sure I must have said this before, but the food here in Gujarat, India, is amazing. Of course, it is mainly vegetarian but there is a vast variety of dishes to be had. This is made all the better by the ready availability of fresh vegetables and spices, bought either from street vendors at the side of the road, the guy with a barrow who comes to your door or the market like the one we went to last weekend.
Since we have been here, we have bought half a dozen or more Indian cookery books from our local bookstore, Crossword, which is very reminiscent of the old ‘Borders’ bookstores we used to have before they were all closed. In fact, Indian cooking isn’t that hard provided you follow the recipes closely. The number of spices and masalas you sometimes have to prepare for just one dish is very labour intensive and time consuming but in essence thisn’t that hard. Since we have been here, we have prepared quite a number of very authentic Indian dishes, quite unlike anything we ever have experienced at home.
But there is one knack we lack that makes us stand out as amateurs, as any Indian housewife will spot, and that is chapati making.
In UK, we have done a lot of baking, particularly all types of bread, and generally these turn out OK. True, like any home baker, we have had our disasters, but on the whole things have turned pretty acceptable. The humble chapati, therefore, should be a piece of cake, or should I say a piece of dough?
Making chapatis sounds pretty easy; wheat flour, salt, a little oil and water and that’s it. Having baked bread, making chapati dough is very straight forward; mix all the ingredients together using your hands, adding a little water at a time until you have a very pliable dough. Then it is just a case of placing in a bowl and covering with a damp cloth and leaving to rest for half hour or so.
Now comes the first sign of us being more than a little amateurish; rolling out the chapatis. We have the right gear, a smallish rolling pin and a small, round wooden board that has three little legs, on which the chapatis are rolled. You take a piece of dough about the size of a Ping-Pong ball and roll it into a nice round chapati. Only ours don’t come out round, they either turn out the shape of the map of India, which isn’t too bad in our books, or worst of all like a map of Australia, not at all round and with a dog’s ear.
The next stumbling block for us is the cooking. In theory, nothing at all hard about this, they’re just cooked on a hot plate. We even have the right sort of hot plate, a sort of very flat frying pan. Here in India it is called a tawa, which is identical to what we would call in Europe a crepe pan. You get the idea.
You get your pan hot, no oil is required, chapatis are cooked dry, and drop on your map of Australia, let cook on one side for 30 seconds or so, turn it over and let that side cook for a little longer than you did side one. Now should come the impressive part, the part every India housewife has mastered, the part guys on street food stalls do second nature, but we generally fail miserably at. You take it off the pan and place it over an open flame on the stove and it should rise up majestically like a small inflated balloon. Ours sometimes do that but we fail as often as not.
May be we don’t roll the dough out to the right thickness, it should be very thin I believe, maybe we don’t quite have the heat of our tawa right or maybe it is something to do with the map of Australia.
Whatever it is, the perfect chapati is still a trick we haven’t quite yet mastered but I am sure we will get there. After all, we eat curry every day.