In Singapore roti prata is sold at just about every food centre, very cheaply available at about $1 a piece. I've loved these ever since I was a kid and it's something I have missed a lot since moving away.
Conceptually they are easy to make. White flour is mixed with salt and water, rested, then stretched somewhat acrobatically, oiled with ghee, folded into an envelope (or twisted and spiralled) and fried on a hot pan with more ghee.
For the amateur at home, the difficulty is knowing how wet the dough should feel before it is rested (and how long it is rested) so as to have the best balance between tension and give during the stretching stage.
This time I got really close in terms of taste and texture and only because things got a little haywire. I made a 55% hydration dough with my all-purpose 11g protein white flour (also added salt) and intended to let this rest for about 15 hours or so before making them. However things got in the way and it became 30 hours!
After 30 hours, the dough was extremely slack, but could still be stretched very well without tearing.
In fact the stretching was effortless because the dough was so relaxed. After stretching, I drizzled some ghee all over, folded it up like an envelope, then fried it on the pan with a little ghee.
Taste-wise this was spot-on: definitely the closest that I've gotten to what they sell back home. The long rest definitely contributed to this, and I was lucky that temperatures did not soar in the kitchen.
Very pleased to have stretched (lol) this to the limits. We had this with a simple chicken tomato curry: onion-garlic-ginger blended into a paste, then sauteed with cardamom, cloves, fennel seeds, cumin, ground coriander seeds, turmeric, chilli, then boiled with tomatoes, sauteed chicken pieces, potato and curry leaves. The kiddos had their pratas plain with sugar as a treat!
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Nicely done, Lin. Homesick, eh? :)
Nothing better than warm, crispy, griddle-fried phyllo dough
Kudos to you for being able to differentiate cumin, fennel, and caraway. Here, the word 'jintan' can mean any of those three. One local brand has the word 'caraway' on it, but I don't know at all if caraway is supposed to be citrusy. Anyway, I used it anyway to learn Indian cooking back then as part of cumin-corriander-turmeric trinity 😂
Jay
homesick I am 😂 To another Singaporean I would say "Homesick until cannot homesick already"
The cumin-coriander-turmeric trinity is fab! We tend to go heavier on the coriander. It's very funny because back in college my friends would joke around in the kitchen and say "well let's get started with frying the trinity shall we", meaning the ginger-garlic-onion paste.
I actually don't use caraway in my cooking too much; cardamom quite a bit, but caraway barely. Our caraway guru Rob might be able to shed some light on how citrusy caraway might be. I find that even a little caraway makes its presence felt quite strongly.
Man, I don't know about cardamom in Singapore, but our cardamom is like white bulbs. They don't taste bad, but distinct from green cardamom used in other parts of the world.
The first time I roasted veggie curry using green cardamom (I prefer roasting, the veg taste a lot sweeter and the browning taste nice too. Coconut milk added in the very end), I was like, "Maaan, what have I been missing! Ok, green cardamom is my staple from now on"
Jay
Javanese white cardamom (Amomum compactum)
Whenever I'm cooking I find I gravitate to a base of cumin, coriander, turmeric and paprika too. Of course onion, garlic and ginger get fried together first and those four get added in. And then other things. It's not only a Singaporean thing! 🤔
When it comes to caraway, I want to like caraway. Perhaps my taste for it was burnt out from the caraway/deli rye I hated as a kid. Have grand plans to experiment more with 'micro dosing' caraway.
-Jon
😂 Well, I guess everyone's gotta be a guru of something 😂
Hmmm, caraway ... as breadzik said in a recent thread about Polish ryes, many American deli ryes use way too much caraway. Caraway's dominance comes through astringency/bitterness. I don't find it citrusy at all -- unless we're talking about one of the super-bitter orange varieties like bergamot or daidai or laraha, none of which I have tasted except in Earl Grey tea. And I've never detected caraway in any of the curries I've eaten.
Cumin dominates in a totally different aromatic, perfumy manner. Fennel to me is like sweet liquorice, while anise and star anise are more intense: woody and botanical.
To be fair, though, my experience is with spices sold in sealed jars in supermarkets. I am sure the seeds -- even dried -- are very different when purchased in their native lands, where people use them a whole lot.
Still, what's fascinating to me is why these wildly different languages -- German, Polish, Indonesian -- all have this confusion between cumin and caraway.
Rob
PS: Jon! Microdosing! Careful!
gotta say, Lin, that the roti pratas sound great, but it's your description of the 'simple' curry that's making me like one of Pavlov's dogs. My brain is saying: 'must cook this immediately.'
Rob
That made me laugh, Rob. This curry lifts all spirits. The vegetarian version that I make for brother-in-law sometimes has lentils. Also good with some paneer.
This sounds delicious. Did it have an 'elastic' chew to it? That's what I'm imagining.
It reminds me of your previous post where you had your hands showing through semi transparent pie dough!
Was there salt in the dough for those 30 hours?
All in all sounds like a fabulous success to me!
-Jon
So what was interesting here, Jon, was that using the 11g protein flour made all the difference. The prata was shatteringly crunchy but tender to chew. In the past, I would use flour with slightly higher protein content and it would be a little too tough to my liking, even if it were crunchy. Back then I was under the impression that a much higher protein content flour would give me a dough that could be stretched much thinner. But now I've learnt that other factors that matter are resting time, hydration and whether or not the dough is kneaded (in this case, not).
Funnily enough, I was making the spinach pie that you mentioned yesterday afternoon, which I've always made with high-protein flour (around the same hydration, but resting time around 4 hours). That dough stretches as thinly as prata dough, but of course with a lot more rolling and manoeuvring. I had some left over, and I thought why not "prata" it with some ghee and a few folds and pan fry it. And yes, the above is confirmed! Crunch is as good, but bite is significantly tougher. Taste certainly lacks the "oomph" of prata.
And yes, the dough was salted for all those hours, thankfully!
Great looking bake. I can see how perfectly this would go with a flavorful curry.
Thanks for sharing.
Best,
Ian
Yes, prata is excellent for cleaning the curry bowl too :)