Little did I know before buying this variety of wheat flour — a first since I moved to Tramin in South Tyrol five years ago — that I was about to unlock another level in my chapati-making skills
I missed the belan I had in Delhi, and it was obvious I was making do with a pastry roller, but I could argue that my chapatis tasted even better than what either of my parents makes. Representation pic/iStock
I’m not sure why it took me five years to use Indian chakki atta to make chapatis. I can concoct a few explanations in my defence. The brands exporting the stuff primarily trade in large quantities. Even though I grew up in a household where we usually ate rice for lunch and chapatis or bread for dinner, the idea of buying a five-kilo packet felt daunting. In my kitchen here in Tramin, the cuisine flits between Goan, Indian, South Tyrolian, and Italian. One day, I’ll be cooking a bone marrow soup, the way my father-in-law makes it, the next a pasta with radicchio, speck and gorgonzola or a risotto with foraged porcini mushrooms and white wine. Somewhere mid-week, I may make prawn curry with rice or peas pulao with dal. I enjoy playing with local ingredients, especially vegetables I’ve never eaten before, like rattlesnake beans — a recent discovery. The experimental cook in me loves the idea of understanding how I might use what is available to me here to make approximations of what I’ve cooked with ease back home in India. For these are other reasons connected with childcare, for the longest time, I simply used Italian wholewheat flour to make chapatis. Sometimes I’d lighten the density of the dough by mixing it with spelt flour. I have successfully used this combination to make everything from poie to paranthas and rotis to chapatis as well as puris. I’ve been fairly pleased with the outcome.
Recently, though, having understood that we are a household that enjoys eating rice, I decided to order a large quantity from an online retailer that has its warehouse in the EU region. I discovered they had the option of a five-kilo pack of flour. Since the shipping was free, I wouldn’t have to worry about lugging it into the car, then out, then up the stairs, I put it in my ‘cart’, along with a few items I don’t often find in the ‘oriental’ shops near me, like podi, lasun chutney and pani puri masala. For months, the atta was lying in our tiny pantry, because, unlike the other South Asians living here, I don’t have a large enough drum to contain such a large quantity, nor do I have so much space in my apartment. A week ago, when I finally made some time to reorganise my spice drawers and stock the masala boxes I had gifted myself, I took out about half a kilo of the chakki atta into a glass container that still bore the label ‘dal for sambhar’.
Two days ago, I impulsively decided to quickly knead a dough to go with the chana masala. My hands felt surprised by the ease with which it came together. I rolled out the balls into smaller circles and applied some Amul ghee — another recent purchase — then folded them into a triangle. After rolling them all out, I made the chapatis on the tava I ‘borrowed’ from my mother-in-law when we moved into our own apartment. The chapatis were ridiculously soft yet flaky and comforting. It went perfectly with the chana masala it was meant to accompany. I missed the belan I had in Delhi, and it was obvious I was making do with a pastry roller, but I could argue that my chapatis tasted even better than what either of my parents makes. I don’t know if there’s a suppleness in my fingers that has come from being such a committed cook, or feeling confident in the kitchen, or acknowledging my cross-cultural fluency. But I had clearly unlocked another level in my chapati-making skills. I knew right then there could be no going back to using Italian flour. When I shared my recent triumph with a work colleague from Navi Mumbai who lives in Dubai, she told me her own story of regularly transporting chakki atta in her luggage and about this one time she was stopped by security personnel who couldn’t fathom why she was taking this along!
But the afterglow of my triumph didn’t end here. In the evening, I told our oldest that the dinner menu included ‘Indian pancakes’. I told him he could help me knead the dough, and so, we both put on our South Tyrolean aprons — they are very region-specific in their design — and got to work. The next half hour was pure joy as Josef helped me knead, cut up the dough with his child-safe knife, form balls, and finally roll it out with the pastry dough. As part of my attempt to be less ‘perfectionistic’ in my tendencies, I simply let him make whatever shape he wanted. I wanted him to delight in the process and not get hung up on making round chapatis. He ate them hot as they came off the tava, compelled, like me, by their buttery flakiness. Yesterday he asked to make them again. As we undertook the task, I let him take charge. I remembered, later, that one of the first unpublished ‘columns’ I ever wrote was titled ‘Who says a chapati has to be round?’. I had the strange suspicion of having arrived full circle.
Deliberating on the life and times of every woman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She posts @rosad1985 on Instagram
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