Street, Eat, Repeat. Pile up the parathas

Blame it on the winter nip. Or on recent jaunts to Delhi and Amritsar. Or those cruel advertisements featuring blobs of butter melting atop golden parathas. Whatever the reason, I’m feeling distinctly dissatisfied.

When it comes to food, Mumbai does most things well — from chaat to vodka chilly cheesecake, from pork belly baus to bisi bele bhaath . But what I really, really want today is the perfect paratha. And that is a tough ask.

Admittedly, mountains of parathas are probably being rolled out all over Mumbai, even as I type and gripe — in mock dhabas, five-star kitchens and catering outfits. But somehow they never live up to the fare that the average Jalandhar daadi insouciantly tosses out between TV soaps and cups of chai. Or those that burly magicians produce so nonchalantly at crowded street corners in Amritsar. Crisp on the outside, soft and spicy in the middle, and so hot and yummy that you are robbed of speech and sense.

The most successful parathas are sinfully fried circles, like the ones rolled out at Gali Parathe Wali in Old Delhi, amidst lace shops, selfie-snapping tourists and chaos. Or the crisp, substantial squares plonked down in those tyre-festooned dhabas amidst the mustard fields of Punjab. Or the deceptively light, spice-laden triangles that arrive in oily parcels and enliven working lunches in Amritsar.

And once you’ve sampled those, it’s impossible to make do with limp lookalikes. For example, the pale, goody-goody, I’m-trying-to-be-healthy version that invariably emerges from my kitchen. Or the doughy, paunchy fellows served up by so many Mumbai restaurants. Or, for that matter, pizza parathas, pasta parathas, Schezwan parathas and other terrifying variations. The true paratha — the stuff of nostalgia and fridge magnets — is laden with cholesterol and ghee and an array of delectable fillings. Aloo, of course, is the universal favourite, followed closely by gobi, paneer and cheese. But there are loads of options, from achar to barfi, kheema to shrimp.

During a recent trip to Delhi, ignoring the general disapproval, I headed to Gali Parathe Wali. “They deep-fry their parathas,” gasped a size zero acquaintance. “Just a tourist trap,” sneered another. “When we were kids there used to be about 20 paratha places there. No longer what it used to be.”

Perhaps, but I still wanted to buy silver, nibble on jalebis and stroll into the tiny gali that has been dispensing parathas for almost 150 years, one that has served the likes of Jawaharlal Nehru. And come up with inspired stuffings like papad, banana, meva , karela, rabdi , kishmish and badam.

During this jaunt, I only sampled the offbeat papad paratha. (I may be a food columnist, but even I can’t gobble more than one deep-fried paratha a day and look size zero in the eye.) So now I have at least six exciting reasons to return to Delhi.

Meanwhile Mumbai remains distressingly pragmatic about parathas. Supermarket trolleys are piled high with frozen stuff. Nutrition-obsessed mummies sneak hated veggies into parathas and feed them to unsuspecting toddlers — no doubt scarring them for life. (In fact, parathas have been around since Vedic times and it’s easy to imagine an Amar Chitra Katha- type maa, desperate to force some spinach down her recalcitrant toddler, stuffing it into a paratha. And starting a food trend that has thrived for millennia.)

In fact, parathas have not only survived, they have travelled surprisingly well. In Bengal, the delectable Mughlai paratha is stuffed with meat, covered with egg and fried. In Kerala, the dish has taken on the glorious guise of the flaky, layered parotta. In Chennai, this is broken into little bits and fried on a tawa with meat, veggies and loads of spices and sold as kothu roti.

The paratha has also accompanied the Indian diaspora to foreign lands. The Malaysian murtabak is stuffed with stir-fried mince and egg. Friends from the UAE still pine for chips Oman paratha — a flaky paratha smothered in cream cheese, doused with a spicy sauce, covered with crushed, spicy chips and rolled. While the buss up shot is a Trinidadian paratha that is actually beaten so that the layers separate and look like a tattered, burst up shirt! The outcome is melt-in-the-mouth fabulous.

So much so that the quest for the perfect paratha might turn out to be an expensive business — and actually end in Chennai or Port of Spain rather than Patiala!

Malaysian murtabak

For the dough

500g maida

Ghee

2 cups water mixed with some salt

Filling:

100g minced chicken

1 small onion diced

1 garlic chopped

1/2 inch ginger chopped

2 tbsp kurma or curry powder

1/2 tsp ground black pepper

2 eggs, beaten

A pinch of sugar and salt to taste

Dough : Knead 1 tbsp ghee with flour in a large bowl, adding salted water bit by bit. Mix until it forms a ball and dough pulls from the bowl. Cover bowl with damp towel and let it rise for two hours.

Filling : Sauté garlic, ginger, then add minced chicken, spice powder, black pepper, salt and sugar and stir until cooked. When filling has cooled, put in bowl and mix diced onions and beaten eggs.

Murtabak:

1 Sprinkle ghee on work surface. Take a portion of the dough, shape into a ball and flatten it into a very thin sheet with your palms and by gently pulling the ends. Fold the edges to create a square, sprinkle one tsp of ghee and a little flour and roll out to create a thin rectangular layer.

2 Evenly spoon 2 tbsp of the filling into the middle and fold the four sides like an envelope.

3 Carefully lift the murtabak with both hands into an oiled and pre-heated tawa. Cook for 2-3 minutes till brown. Then lift, add more oil to the tawa and cook the other side till brown.

Shabnam Minwalla is a journalist and the author of 'The Strange Haunting of Model High School' & 'The Shy Supergirl'

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