Indian Recipes - Frying the Parathas

Hi, I am Bhasin from the Bombay Curry Company in Alexandria an Indian Restaurant, showing you how to make parathas. We are doing today a multilayered plain paratha and I have shown you two ways of rolling the paratha and we will see which one works better for you. We will also do two ways of cooking this paratha. So the first way of cooking this paratha is cooking it fully on the tava or the griddle. This griddle is called a tava in Hindi and it s an integral part of any Indian kitchen. So, lets start rolling the paratha and see what happens. We keep applying a little flour to it, whole wheat flour, that is what we are using and we just keep rolling it and we shall roll it nice and thin and then we shall start cooking it. Parathas because of the oil that it has in it, tends to stay longer has a longer shelf life. So in India when we didn t have refrigeration and we went on long train journeys or when we went for picnics, a paratha was a very popular bread because unlike a dry tortilla or something like that it did not dry up.

Alright we are going to put this on the griddle or the tava and while that is been done, we are going to work on rolling the other one. How much are you going to cook the paratha? What s going to happen is, once you put the paratha or the bread or the dough on the hot griddle, you will see that it starts turning translucent. If you cook it on too hot flame, it will burn. You don t want it to burn, so you want to make sure that your flame is a kind of the heat is medium hot and you can see it changing color. You don t want that the browning to start right now, that color change tells you that it is getting cooked. Also if you cook it at too higher temperature it will brown outside and stay undone inside which is something which you don t want and you may not also get all the layers that you are looking for.

So let s see what s happening over here, we will flip it, yup it looks beautiful. Its cooked, but it s not brown. That browning process we want to derive by frying it lightly at the last stage. Okay, we will give it another minute or two to be done and then in the next segment we will fry and serve the paratha.