Paratha

Paratha

Potato paratha (aloo paratha) from India
Alternative names	Paratha, parauntha, palata, farata, parontay, prontha
Region or state	Indian Subcontinent
Main ingredients	Atta, maida, ghee/butter/cooking oil and various stuffings

A paratha is a flatbread that originated in the Indian subcontinent. It is still prevalent throughout Pakistan and India,and Myanmar, where wheat is grown and is the traditional staple of the area. Paratha is an amalgamation of the words parat and atta which literally means layers of cooked dough. Alternative spellings and names include parantha, forota (in Sylheti), parauntha, prontha, parontay, porota (in Bengali), palata (pronounced: [pəlàtà]; in Burma), and farata (in Mauritius, Sri Lanka and the Maldives).

Recipes for various stuffed wheat parathas are mentioned in Manasollasa, a 12th-century Sanskrit encyclopedia compiled by Someshvara III, who ruled from present-day Karnataka.

Parathas are one of the most popular unleavened flatbreads in the India part of the Indian Subcontinent and they are made by baking whole wheat dough on a tava, and finishing off with shallow frying. Parathas are thicker and more substantial than chapatis/rotis and this is either because, in the case of a plain paratha, they have been layered by coating with ghee or oil and folding repeatedly (much like the method used for puff pastry or some types of Turkish börek) using a laminated dough technique; or else because food ingredients such as mixed vegetables have been mixed in with the dough, such as potato and/or cauliflower, green beans and carrots. A Rajasthani mung bean paratha uses both the layering technique together with mung dal mixed into the dough, while some so called stuffed parathas resemble a filled pie squashed flat and shallow fried using two discs of dough sealed round the edges; alternatively using a single disc of dough to encase a ball of filling and sealed with a series of pleats pinched into the dough round the top, gently flattened with the palm against the working surface before being rolled into a circle. Most stuffed parathas are not layered.