Recipe : Sajjige Rotti / Rawa Rotti / Rulavanchi Bhakri / Thick Semolina Dosas

Sajjige rotti / rulavanchi bhakri / rava rotti / thick semolina dosas with 2 types of chutney.

I may have mentioned before, but weekend brunches are special. These are the only 2 days that the husband has time for a leisurely noonish meal - without being on a conference call or rushing for one.

While he loves eggs made any which way for a weekend brunch, I’m taking the opportunity during this lockdown to cook dishes from my childhood or other memories. I'm not a breakfast person at all. I normally have One Meal a Day, since long before OMAD was a thing. During our 5 years in London, weekends meant heading out to see / do  / experience something and breakfast / brunch was built into the day's schedule.

This is the first time, I'm actually cooking so many breakfast / brunches at home - albeit only on the weekends. This is also the 2 meals of the week that I enjoy a carb heavy meal (since its eaten so much earlier in the day) and a cup of coffee with sugar - during the week, its green tea without sugar.

Coming back to the sajjige rotti, the way I made today’s rotti was not the thinner crispy version that’s made like a crepe. This is a very rustic style thick batter (almost chapatti dough consistency) that is shaped by hand on the pan / tawa, so its much thicker like a bhakri.

Since I was doing the hand shaping for the first time, the first dosas / rotis were a bit uneven shaped. Once I got the hang of it, they became much rounder, but since they are slow fried on a low flame, we were gobbling them as soon as they came off the pan - so didn’t take a better picture.

Ingredients:

2 cups Bombay Rava - medium fine semolina

2 cups sour curd (slightly liquidy, not as thick as store bought yoghurt - for store yoghurt, make it 1.5 cups yoghurt + 1/2 cup water)

2 tbsp coconut / dessicated coconut (optional)

1 medium onion chopped

1-6 green chillies chopped (depending on spice tolerance)

2 sprigs curry leaves chopped (only leaf not stem)

2 sprigs corriander chopped - with stem

2 tsp chopped fresh ginger (don't use the stringy bits)

1 tsp jeera / cumin

salt to taste

oil to fry

Method:

Mix the Bombay rava, coconut if using and the curd / yoghurt.

Mix well and leave overnight.

You want a dough, that is much thicker than a dosa batter and actually comes together, but not as tight as a chapatti dough.

You can keep the dough for just 20-30 minutes too, but I like the way the flavour / sourness develops overnight.

It also means a tiny bit of extra sleep in the morning :)

If you have left it overnight, depending on the weather conditions, you may notice that your batter has become drier or wetter than the night before.

Don't adjust it at this stage.

Add  the onions, chillies, curry leaves, coriander leaves, ginger, jeera and mix well.

These are the traditional additions, feel free to experiment with flavours you like.  For eg. my chillies are now 3 weeks old (grocery run in the coming week), so I felt they weren't spicy enough, so I also added a 1/2 tbsp of crushed black pepper.

Mix well, preferably use your hands to get a more even mix. (be sure you have washed with soap and not just used santizer :) )

There will be some liquid content in the onions, ginger and herbs.

Now if the dough feels too dry, add a few drops of water.

If the dough feels too wet, add a little rava to the mix.

The picture above shows the consistency that you want.

Make portions. With the above quantities, I got about 10 portions.

The next step is shaping them.

Traditionally, the rottis are shaped on banana leaves or some other traditional leaves (I forget which ones my nana used) and flipped onto the pan.

Modern methods, involve shaping the rotti on a greased plate or on plastic sheets.

Personally, I found these methods very fiddly and also I was only cooking for 2, so I shaped them directly on the pan.

Take a flat frying pan  / crepe pan or dosa tawa.

Heat the pan on medium heat.

Grease the pan with a few drops of oil. The traditional method is to use a small onion or potato cut in half speared onto a fork (don't let the tines come all the way through, you will end up scraping your pan). I currently use a silicon pastry brush to grease the pan.

I made portions like above, popped one on the pan. Dipped hand in a bowl of water and then flattened  the dough directly on the pan itself.

You need wet hands to use this method, doughy hands will make the dough stick to your hands. So rinse hands in a bowl of water, before shaping the rotti.

Flatten the rotti evenly to between 1/2 - 1 cm thickness.

Don't make them too large or they will be very difficult to flip over.

Fry for a few minutes on each side until slightly browned.

I served it hot off the pan with 2 types of chutney, although I have to say that the coconut chutney went better with this dosa / rotti. The advantage of this rotti, is that it can even be eaten without chutney, making it a one pot meal.

A dab of white butter on top is also a perfect accompaniment.

Kim's Tip 1 : If you have just a little chutney left in the fridge, you can add it to the rotti dough.

Kim's Tip 2 : This recipe is an excellent way to use up curd / yoghurt that has turned a bit sour. If you don't have sour yoghurt, add a tsp of fresh lemon / lime juice to your yoghurt and use.

Let me know if you try this out.

We got a good warm bit of sun this winter noon.  So, after this meal, someone decided a nap was in order, followed by a cheery wake up with South Indian Filter Coffee.

While the other someone was out in the sun tending to the garden and feeding our sparrows, laughing doves, wagtails and other birds who have become extremely demanding. They chirrup loudly if the feeders are approaching empty to let me know it’s time for a top up.

Recipe : Kheema / Mince Parathas

This is a great way to finish up leftover mince - whether it is  chicken, mutton or beef mince. And it turns into a complete meal, with just some raita on the side, especially if you have peas or carrots in your mince.

Ingredients : 
1 portion leftover mince
wheat flour
salt to taste
water for the dough
a little oil or ghee for frying

Method:
Mash the mince a bit if you have large vegetable chunks in it and dry it out, if it is liquidy.
Bring the mince back to room temperature.
Make a dough with wheat flour, salt to taste and water.
Make lemon sized balls and flatten them into circles, thick in the center and thinner at the edges.
Put a spoon of kheema in the centre and fold the edges over the kheema to form a ball.

Flatten and roll the disc in plain wheat flour.
If using a roti maker, put a dab of oil on each side (without rolling in flour) and make rotis as normal.
If using a tawa, fry on each side on a low flame, putting just a little oil or ghee on each side to help crisp it up.
Serve hot with cold raita.

Recipe : Home Made Stuffed Naan on a Gas Stove Tandoor

In the run up to Diwali, my husbands mom and maami are beseiged with menu requests from their husbands and visiting children. On Chhoti Diwali, the final consensus was for stuffed naan and paneer ki sabji.

I have to mention here, that my husbands mom and maami cook almost identically to each other without the aid of any written recipes. On a blind taste test it would be almost impossible to identify who cooked what. So its equally difficult to identify whom to attribute a recipe to and hence I will alwasy attribute it to them both.

There are 2 ways to make naan at home. The instant way is to mix maida (plain flour) with a bit of sugar and salt and then make the dough using only soda water. The dough is ready for rolling after resting for 5-10 minutes. You can also rest this dough for a couple of hours if you prefer.

But if you have enough time to rest the dough, you will get tastier naans by mixing maida (plain flour) with a bit of sugar and salt, a teaspoon of ghee or butter, a little cream, a little yoghurt and a bit of yeast. If you do not want to use yeast, you can again just make a dough with soda water. Rest this dough in a warmish place, so it can rise. If using yeast, let it rise for at least 8 hours.

The main equipment you need, to make authentic naan at home is a tandoor. A coal burning tandoor isn't practical for most homes and the electric tandoors take up too much place if you live in an apartment and only use it occassionally. My mom-in-law has an ingenious contraption that fits over a regular gas burner but works like a tandoor. This needs to be preheated before you can start using it, much like how an oven would operate.

This time they decided to stuff the naans with paneer or grated cheese, so there were 2 varieties of stuffed naans that were being rolled out simultaneously.

Mami was working so quickly with her hands, I had to get her to stop and work in extreme slow motion so I could capture the basic steps.

Flatten out a ball of dough.

Drop some stuffing on it.

Draw the edges to the top and crimp shut.

Carefully flatten again, so the stuffing does not pop out.

Roll out the naans.

There are 2 ways of doing the next step. The traditional method would be to lightly moisten the inside of the dome of the tandoor contraption and stick the naan onto that. Giventhat it is burning hot, the easier option is to lightly pre fry the naans on a tawa kept on a low flame.

Then place the pre fried naans on the grill of the tandoor.

Keep turning over every minute or so until done.

Dot lightly with melted butter and serve hot with a bowl of steaming curry/korma like the paneer gravy below.

Edited on 29 Oct 2011 to add:
My friend Michelle from Food, Football and a Baby asked for better quantities, so upon checking, its roughly
1 cup maida (plain flour), salt to taste, sugar about a teaspoon or more if you want it sweeter, cream 1 teaspoon, yoghurt 1 tablespoon, ghee/butter - 1 tsp and enough soda water to make the dough (no other liquid at all). They prefer not to use yeast in general.

Recipe: Low fat Parathas using the Roti Maker

As I've blogged befoe, using the roti maker has been a huge boon as it means so much less washing up. The husband is the only one who eats rotis at home and earlier the amount of cleanup and washing to make 3-4 rotis or parathas was just too much.

The roti maker eliminates all the extra flour used when rolling, which then flies all over the kitchen and gets into the holes on the gas burner. There is no chakla belan to be washed. And the roti maker itself, just has to be wiped clean with a damp cloth. so all I have to wash is the bowl in which I mix the dough or have stored the dough in.

Ingredients:
Whole wheat flour
salt to taste
water to make the dough
a little ajwain - optional
a little ghee/butter to fry

Method:
Make the dough, the same way that you would for rotis or phulkas.
When using the roti maker, don't press down as hard as you would for a roti, so that the parathas aren't too thin.
Fry on one side for 15-30 seconds, turn over.
Rub a drop of ghee on the top surface, turn over and repeat.
Keep turning over every few seconds until the paratha is cooked.

You can even close the roti maker in between, to speed up the cooking.
Parathas are much faster this way and I find that I use so much less ghee. Just 2 drops of ghee to a paratha.

Serve hot with any gravy or dry dish. In the first picture in this post, it has been served with Chawla's Cream Chicken and pickled onions.

Recipe: Mrs Nath's Mattar Parathas - Indian bread stuffed with peas

This is a recipe from my friend Arindam's mom. He served them to us at dinner at his place. The parathas were really very tasty and we gladly accepted the offer to take home leftovers to be refried the next day.. He has been kind enough to share the recipe.

Of course technique is key to making parathas and I'm terrible at stuffing and rolling out parathas (I can barely manage rotis), so my pictures look a bit mangled. But the taste was so good, that I had to share the recipe.

Ingredients:
Roti dough / paratha dough (made from wheat flour, a pinch of ghee and salt)
For the Stuffing:
1 cup fresh/frozen peas (not dried - you won't get the flavour from dried peas)
1 tsp saunf - fennel seeds
1-3 green chillies (adjust heat to your taste)

pinch of sugar
salt to taste
ghee to fry (or oil if you want to keep it vegan)

Method:
Puree the green peas (if frozen, let them come to room temperature) in a blender
Saute the pureed peas with the saunf, chillies, sugar and salt.
Fry on a low flame until it reaches the consistency slightly drier than mashed potatoes.
Stuff this filling into balls of dough and roll out the parathas (how much stuffing you manage to put in is completely dependent on your competence at stuffing- my MIL who is supremely competent in this art has more stuffing than dough in her parathas - something I can only aspire to)

Slowly fry the parathas in ghee (for best taste use at least a tsp per paratha) on a low flame till well cooked on both sides.

Serve hot.

The simplest accompaniment to stuffed parathas is  yoghurt and pickles.
You can get fancy and serve it with a raita.
Its a wonderful filling breakfast to start a busy day.
Stuffed parathas aren't normally served with dhal, if they are, it would be with a black dhal rather than a yellow dhal.
You can serve it with a dry vegetable side or a semi gravy side of meat. In the picture below, its served with tawa kebabs.

Recipe: Puris/Lucchis - deep fried puffed Indian Bread

Puris are a dish eaten across India. In Mangalore, it is eaten for breakfast with a dry potato bhaji similar to the filling of a masala dosa. It is eaten at lunch or dinner with a dry spicy mince dish.My uncle has a unique combination - where he eats puris with sheera

 In the North, puris for breakfast are served with a watery potato curry or halwa. In Maharashtra, puris are paired with Shrikhand (thickened, sweetened, sometimes flavoured yoghurt) for a special treat. In the North puris are often consumed at meal times as an alternate to rotis. My grandmother-in-law insists that on festive occassions, rotis/phulkas will not be consumed at home - it has to be puris!

While puris are made with wheat flour, in Bengal they make them with maida and call them lucchis. The recipe is the same with just this one substitution.

Making puris used to be a pain, when I had to use the traditional chakla & belan. If one is making puris alone, its a tricky matter of timing of rolling them out and frying them before the puris get burnt or the rolled dough drying out. It is so much easier with my roti maker. Also with the roti maker, there are no extra bits of dry wheat flour sticking to the dough - which tend to burn at the bottom of the deep frying pan.

Ingredients:
2 cups wheat flour (or maida for lucchis)
salt to taste
water to adjust

Method:
Make a dough with all the ingredients by slowly adding water and mixing to form a ball.

 

The dough is done if - when pressing it, it gets depressed and then slowly springs back into shape. Leave the dough to rest for at least half an hour in summer and one hour in winter. (I refrigerate leftover dough and it can be used for rotis or puris for upto 3-4 days)

Roll out into little rounds and deep fry.

With the roti maker, I  rolled them all out into circles and stacked them and then fried them one after another. Without fail, each and everyone of the puris fluffed up completely.

I served the puris with hari dhaniya ki aloo (fried potatoes in a green corriander chutney) and a Manglorean dry dish of mince, potatoes and peas.

Recipe: Methi Nu Thepla (Indian Vegan Bread with fenugreek greens)

Methi Theplas are of Gujarathi origin and keep well for a couple of days and hence are highly favoured on rail and road journeys. Regular phulkas don't taste as good when cold and bhasi puris aren't the healthiest of options.

When I lived in Hyderabad and Bombay, a lot of bakeries and groceries carried these theplas in packets of 5 with some green chilli pickle and it was an excellent option to keep in my fridge for breakfast or as roti substitutes for lunch and dinner, especially since I hated the washing up that came with making rotis for one or 2 people and hated the effort involved in making rotis for a whole load of friends. As is clearly evident, I come from a rice eating family :)

My mum gifted my husband a roti maker for his last birthday with admonishments to ME to use it and make the poor deprived North Indian guy rotis, with every meal. Well this gadget really has helped, as I just make the dough and the little dough balls for 2-3 days, then I put the dough ball into the roti maker. A litle pressing and flipping and the roti is ready. Nice and evenly circular. Rotis I can put pictures of here on my blog without praying for at least one tocome out perfectly shaped. No chakla, belan, tongs, tawa and a mess of flour to clean up after each meal. Its a real blessing and now that I've got the hang of it, I'm experimenting with varieties of rotis.

Remembering the theplas I enjoyed,  I decided to try to make them myself using a friends recipe I had written down ages back, but never got round to trying..

Ingredients:
2 cups wheat flour
1 cup methi leaves ( I used half a cup of kasuri methi and rehydrated it) - coarsely chopped

1/2 tsp turmeric powder
1/2 tsp jeera powder
1/2 tsp corriander powder
1 tsp chilli powder (you can adjust this for taste if you like)
salt to taste
2 tsps oil for the dough (you can use olive if you prefer)
oil for frying - optional

Method:
Mix all the ingredients including the oil for the dough.
Add enough water to make the dough - same consistency as rotis (I also used the water in which I rehydrated the methi)

Make dough balls, roll into rotis and fry on both sides till golden brown spots appear.
You can use oil when frying to make it more authentic :)
I prefer to fry without oil in a non stick pan and our roti maker is also non stick, so I don't use any additional oil.
Theplas can be served hot or at room temperature with pickles.
They can be packed in foil for picnics or journeys and enjoyed later.

 

I served the theplas with pickle and aloo bhartha (Indian mashed potatoes) 

I'm submitting this recipe for the Roti-Bhakhri-Poli-Thepla-Puri-Rotla leg of Joy of Cooking's Complete My Thali - Event