INGREDIENTS

INSTRUCTIONS

99    
Mix flour and salt in medium bowl.  Make well in center and add  water.
Mix with hand or spoon until you can gather it together into a  dough;
add more flour or water if needed to make kneadable dough.  Turn out
onto lightly floured bread board and knead 8-10 minutes.  Cover with
plastic wrap and let stand 1/2-2 hours.  Divide dough into 1 piece per
chapatti and flatten each with lightly  floured fingers.  Then roll
each piece out to 8" round.  Roll out each  bread without flipping it
over; lightly flour bread board as  necessary to keep bread from
sticking.  Cover finished breads with  plastic wrap as you roll out the
rest.  Don't stack rolled-out  breads; if you don't have enough counter
space, roll out just a few  at a time and begin cooking, then roll out
the rest as the breads  cook.  Heat tava or cast-iron griddle or
skillet over medium-high heat.  When  griddle is hot, place a chapatti
on the griddle, top side down.  Cook  10 seconds, then gently flip
over.  Cook on second side until small  bubbles begin to form,
approxinately 1 minute.  Turn chapatti back to  first side and cook 1
minute longer; at this stage, a perfectly made  chapatti should start
to balloon.  This process can be helped along  by gently pressing on
the bread.  (We find the easiest method is to  use a small cotton cloth
or paper towel, wadded up, to protect your  fingertips from the hot
bread.) Gently press down on a large bubble  in the bread, forcing the
bubble to expand.  If bread starts to burn  on the bottom before it has
ballooned, move chapatti with cloth or  paper towel in griddle,
dislodging it from the point at which it is  beginning to burn. Remove
finished chapatti from griddle and wrap in  clean towel to keep warm
and soft. Cook remaining breads, stacking on  top of one another.
Authors' comments: Making chapattis can be very relaxing.  In quite a
short time, you can produce 8 or 10 breads, each one turning out a
little bit different from the others, but all of them attractive,
nutritious, and good.  We've grown so accustomed to making chapattis
that they now feel almost like a convenience food.  A household  staple
of the best kind. Chapattis are traditionally baked on a  cast-iron
plate called a tava. If you have a tava, use it. Otherwise,  use a
cast-iron griddle or skillet. Chapatti-making can be an  ongoing,
everchanging process. Each griddle is different.  Flours are
different. What works well one day doesn't seem to work as perfectly
the next. But whatever happens, your chapattis, ballooned or not,  will
be good to eat and satisfying and quick to make.  Sylvia's comments:
this worked exactly as described!  As always, I  had the breadmaker mix
up the dough and let it rest in there until I  was ready to roll them
out.  The bubbles formed as advertised, they  cooked fine and puffed up
in my cast-iron pan, and my daughter's face  lit up as she said "These
don't taste like nothing, they taste  GREAT!" They are very forgiving
to cook, a few times I forgot to flip  them after 10 seconds but they
cooked perfectly anyway. The only  substitution I made was to use
regular all-purpose flour instead of  atta flour, which I don't like
the taste of. The only change I'll  make next time is to double the
recipe, the four of us ran out of  chapattis before we ran out of
hunger!  Glen Jamieson's comments on FIDO Cooking echo: We found that
the  underpowered halogen stove was quite incapable of heating a heavy
frying pan anywhere near hot enough to cook them.  The final solution
was to cook the chapattis directly on the glass surface over the  stove
element. Although not as controllable as we would have liked,  with the
thermostat switching it on and off, it produced quite  reasonable
results. Chapattis can be reheated successfully in a  microwave, and,
if thick enough to be split like pita, can be filled  with all sorts of
dal or other sauces for a delicious breakfast.  Nutritional Information
per serving:  xx calories, xx gm protein, xx  gm carbohydrate, xx gm
fat,  x% Calories from fat, x mg chol, xx mg  sodium, x g dietary fiber
Tyops courtesy of Sylvia Steiger, SylviaRN (at) CompuServe (dot) com
Posted to MM-Recipes Digest V4 #14 by tobbs@earthlink.net on May 26,

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Nutrition (calculated from recipe ingredients)
----------------------------------------------
Calories: 0
Calories From Fat: 0
Total Fat: 0g
Cholesterol: 0mg
Sodium: 291.6mg
Potassium: <1mg
Carbohydrates: 0g
Fiber: 0g
Sugar: 0g
Protein: 0g