Baking the Sesame Chapati Bread

Amy Riolo: I am Amy Riolo and we are making Sesame Chapati Bread. Now we have let our dough rise for about two hours until it's gotten double in bulk and so what we are going to do now is to knock it down and that's literally to take it and deflate it and you can see that we are getting it to be a much smaller size again. We are redistributing the gases in the dough so that it will rise evenly and then now what we need to do is shape our dough and this is a very simple process.

Basically, we can divide our dough into four equal pieces because this recipe makes four loaves so you can just divide into half with your bench press and then do it into halves again and we will put those each off to the side. You can double the recipe if you want to make more. This recipe is wonderful one to freeze. As soon as the breads are baked and cool just put them in plastic wrap and freeze them for up to a month. Bring them back to room temperature and just put them into the boiler for 30 seconds and you are ready to eat them any time.

I am going to sprinkle this with a little bit of flour. I have flattened it out a little bit and now I am going to flour our rolling pin lightly and we are just going to roll these out and we are only going to roll them out until about seven inches. You could also if you didn't want to roll them, you could stretch them with your hands that would be absolutely fine. You see how this dough is nice and springy, this is because we have added the egg into the dough. Normal bread doughs are not this springy but it's absolutely a wonderful taste and texture. You really are going to like those feathery layers that are inside of this dough.

So this is about the perfect length for one and we are going to put them on to our baking sheets that we have prepared earlier and then we take our second piece and we do the same thing with it. We are just going to flatten it down lightly and we are going to take out rolling pin. The correct way to hold the rolling pin is by holding your hands on either side of whatever you are rolling and then just pushing forward with a gentle even motion. You don't have to go back and forth very, very quickly, it's actually preferable if you don't go back and forth very quickly, but a lot of people see that on TV and so that is process that they are most familiar with.

So this is our last piece and we have it here on our baking sheet and now what we need to do is give these a little bit more flavor and we are going to do that by adding some clarified butter again on the top and this is going to make that have a nice even golden brown color and absolutely delicious taste. Make sure you get the edges and that way you get browning all over because if you just do the top the edges are going to be visibly white. They also taste great but it just looks a little bit better if you get the edges and at this point we can preheat our broiler because these breads are going to get cooked under the broiler not in a traditional oven. They are flash-baked for about two minutes on each side which is super, super quick so you can get them ready for your meal and enjoy them right way.

The reason why I make these breads in the broiler is because traditionally in Pakistan where this recipe comes from, people will make them a Tandoor or in one of those clay ovens that is extremely fiery hot and because the ovens are so hot and are used to make other things like Kababs, they would put the breads on the inside wall. So while the meat was cooking in the deeper layers in the very hot portions of the oven, the bread would be on the more tanned portion of the oven but here I don't have a Tandoor in my kitchen so we are going to be using a broiler and it works out remarkably well. So you can definitely make that adaption in your own home and these are just sesame seeds that we are putting on top.

If you didn't want to put sesame seeds, you could put poppy seeds, Nigella seeds or spice whatever you have on hand, but the sesame seeds are traditional, they are absolutely wonderful and sesame seeds have lot of protein in them too. So now we are going to actually broil them not bake them for two minutes on each side. They will get to be nice and golden brown and then we turn them over, broil them again for two minutes on the other side. But before we do the second side, we are going to add another layer of clarified butter and more sesame seeds on the second side.

Once we have brushed them with additional clarified butter and sesame seeds, we put them back in for another two minutes and in four minutes you have delicious hot Sesame Chapati Bread. This is what they look like when they are done. You can see both sides are nice and golden brown. You have sesame seeds on both sides and you have the clarified butter on both sides and when you break into them this is the most delicious part of the recipe because when you break in you can see that nice pillowy dough and you can also see that you can very easily make a pocket out of the dough and stuff them. It has a nice level of buttery flavor in there. So enjoy.