Paratha
Laminated Flatbreads, part two
Things on Bread turned two this weekend! To celebrate, I’m offering 20% off subscriptions for the month. So if you’ve been on the fence, now is a great time to join the cool kids who know what’s up . Also, video flatbread class next weekend—details to follow shortly. Thank you all for your support!
Living in the country for the last 20 years has transformed my life. I moved up here in 2006 as a full-time painter, selling enough work to call it my day job. One of the first things I did upon arriving was to put in a big garden. One way or another, everything that’s happened since then has flowed from the fact that the garden required me to learn to cook more and better than I had before. And now here I am writing about food for a living, collaborating with one of the world’s greatest chefs, cooking with other amazing talents, and look forward to more exciting projects.
Another underrated aspect of moving to the sticks initially presented as an inconvenience, a step down in quality of life. The available options for good food from other countries were mostly dismal—even widely popular cuisines like Chinese and Mexican. Forget about African cuisines, or any of the other delights that the greater NYC region is so incredibly rich in. For a long time it was all basically strip mall quality (and not in a good LA way). The silver lining to this paucity, though, was that I had to learn how to make these things for myself.
So I did, over the years, get a pretty good handle on making a lot of different kinds of food. I learned about specific ingredients and techniques, and when I was in the city or somewhere similarly cosmopolitan I would seek out Sichuan or Ethiopian or Peruvian spots to check my work and connect with specific touchstones of flavor. One of the happy results of getting so specific is that over time various dishes would spark an awareness of qualities or methods in common with another dish from a totally different culture. All cooking consists, after all, of solutions to the same small set of problems.
At some point all this knowledge became self-reinforcing; it got a lot easier to learn new dishes because they tended to slot into various categories and I already understood the steps behind those methods, even if the specific ingredients and some details differed. That’s when you know you can cook. Which brings me to the point of this post: years ago, not long after I first learned to make scallion pancakes, I set about learning to make paratha because until recently the local Indian place in Woodstock was pretty dire.
As I read and then executed the steps to whatever recipe I was looking at, it occurred to me that I recognized the method. And then dots connected, people. So now, years later, I’m here to show you how to make flaky, fluffy, buttery paratha using skills you’ve already picked up from my award-deserving scallion pancake post. And, as an extra bonus, I’m going to hip you to whipping up that fetching yellow sauce in the photo, which honestly ranks among my most fabulous recent inventions. So it’ll be fun for the whole family, is what I’m saying.
