Ruti-Alubhaja

"Ruti" is the Bengali word for Hindi, "Roti" or more specifically' "phulka", the very popular Indian handmade flat bread of wheat flour (ata). I usually prefer it for Breakfast, if I, for a change wake up in the morning and have a breakfast. But in many Bengali families ruti is preferred to steamed rice as dinner and most parts of northern India it is the staple food in major meals, and not rice.
This, ruti with "alubhaja", literally, "fried potato", was my evening snack one day since I was just too hungry to be satisfied with a few fritters with my favourite Darjeeling tea.
In my previous post I mentioned that we love potato and we make fried potato in all shapes and sizes. This alubhaja you can make with relatively less oil because you do not need to deep fry. This time, I peeled potato and cut it into very thin and long slices. I mixed salt and turmeric powder well with the potato and kept it aside for a few minutes. In the meantime I chopped chilli and onion finely. I heated the oil in a korai, the traditional deep and circular, cast iron cooking pot, and added the potato draining the water that came out of it. I immediately covered it with a lid. This makes this alubhaja not crispy but soft, better for ruti. After a few minutes I stirred the potatoes. Stirring from time to time is necessary to make sure that the potato doesn't get burnt, and everytime you cover it after stirring..  When the potato is almost cooked, I added the onion and chilli, stirred and mixed well and again covered ad let it cook.This way the onion will be glazed only. After the potato is thoroughly cooked it is ready to serve.
To make ruti, we make the dough of ata, make small balls of it, dust the each ball in flour and roll it out thinly in round shapes and then bake it on high flame. We traditionally use a thick and almost flat cast iron plan that we call "chatu" in Bengali and "tawa" in Hindi, and a flat circular net like thing made of thick iron wire. The pan/chatu shuld be heated already before we put the rolled out dough on it and after placing it on it reduce the flame to medium and cook till small bubbles start to appear. Then remove the pan from flame and place the half done ruti on the net I talked about above, raise the flame to high and put the net direct on the flame. The ruti will puff up like a balloon. The Bengali word for "phulka" is "phulko" that actually means "puffed up".
I will dedicate a separate post on making "phulko ruti" in near future!