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Old 09-18-2006, 12:59 PM
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Post Re: Recipe For Whole Wheat Tortillas

lilmizcheezcake,

Actually, the best place to ask is at Google and if you don't have Google on your browser, then Firefox is
one of the best browsers for Googling and quickly surfing multiples of sites
while using the minimum amount of RAM without the interference of pop-up windows.

Look up whole wheat flour tortillas and also chapatis

The primary difference between flour tortillas and chapatis is that that the tortillas might be cooked on each side until slightly browned whereas chapatis are heated on a dry griddle until they puff up.

Macrobiotic cooks usually avoid using yeast, or any quick leaveners in the dough but if you want the bread to be naturally leavened, you can use a "chef", desem, or sourdough starter (or make one from the dough you are using).

Otherwise you can just have an unleavened flatbread tortilla, pita, or chapati.

When I was lving at and working as a night clerk at the Swiss-American Hotel in North Beach, San Francisco, back in 1979-1980, my immediate superior was a man in his mid to late 60s from Pakistan named Mohammed Siddique C________, who was a devout Muslim, whose wife was back in Karachi, and Siddique who had worked in remote railway station outposts for most of his life in Pakistan, spent most of each year away from his wife and had to cook everything for himself.

So, sometimes I would find him cooking dal and chapatis on the hotel's gas stove and griddle and would inquire how he learned to cook and he told me from watching his wife cook during the short vacations that would he would be back with his family.

The way Siddique made chapatis is he would mix the flour and water and salt into a dough using a spoon and then knead it into a dough with his hands, and grab a smalll bunch of the dough and start forming the dough in the air by pressing and flattening the dough between his fingerti spinning the disk of dough vertically as the disk got bigger and bigger until it reached the size and thinnest that he wanted and then he would toss it on the griddle, prodding it occasionally to keep it from burning until it started to puff up and then he would flip it over and repeat the process until it puffed up some more and then put it on a plate and grab another piece of dough and create another chapati and cook it the same way and continue the same process until all the dough was gone and he had a platter of warm chapatis and then he would turn off the stove, sit down and have a meal of dal and chapatis.

Because of its size, a chapati recipe will follow in the next message...

Last edited by Bruce Paine; 09-18-2006 at 09:36 PM. Reason: correcting the sentence structure
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