How to Make Indian Poori, Part 2

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Hi, I'm Tanya Steel, Editor-in-chief of Epicurious.com.

And you're watching around the world in 80 dishes.

We're in southern India and we're making Poori.

And I'm here with Chef Pardus.

And we're actually gonna cut up the dough now.

So we can make it into the Poori.

So this has rested for half an hour.

Okay, we kneaded it for 10 minutes.

We put it in a bowl.

We covered it with plastic and we rested it for 30 minutes.

[Tanya] And it looks very relaxed.

And it's relaxed.

It's not tight, it's not crumbly.

It's got that nice satiny finish

that I was talking about earlier.

I wanna make elephant ears.

Then tribute to India, but anyway, okay.

Play dough.

It is, I just wanna play with it.

So what we'll do is

just to get this back into shape just a little bit.

We kind of fold it back into itself.

[Tanya] Ah, you do that with bread too.

Yeah, bread and rolls.

So just for 30 seconds, a minute.

If it's a little tacky, this is a time

that you can adjust that by adding a little bit

more flour to it while you're kneading.

But as you can see, it's gonna clean off the table.

So it's really the perfect consistency.

It sure is.

Now,

what we'll do next is we'll just cut this in half.

Use a sharp knife.

And there's a couple of ways you could go about this.

What we're doing is sort of the more traditional

Indian method which is more labor intense.

You could if you want simply take this whole mass

and roll it out into a sheet and use cookie cutters

depending on what size of Poori that you wanted.

I like playing with dough so this is fine with me.

So we make a couple of,

in which try one, it's fun.

Yeah.

Do you stretch it out like that?

Well as you're working, watch.

You roll back and forth and you gradually,

[Tanya] I see.

With a little bit of pressure?

Little bit of pressure, you're pressing down

and you're slowly stretching your hands out.

You start the middle and go from the inside out

all the time.

All the time.

Let me try that.

Really use your hands, roll it.

[Tanya] Like this?

[Chef Pardus] Mhmm, and as you're rolling forward

you're spreading your palms outward.

[Tanya] So you're using quite a bit of pressure.

[Chef Pardus] Well you don't want to flatten it.

You wanna keep it cylindrical but,

I so wanna do this with my back.

Oh my god, wouldn't that be fantastic?

All right, does that look good?

That looks good.

Okay.

Now the next step is to,

we're gonna cut each rope into eight pieces.

So I find the easiest way to do this

would be to use a sort of sushi chef approach.

And that would be cut it in half.

And then cut each half in half.

And then you cut each quarter in half.

And you're gonna end up with approximately

eight even pieces.

And now if we need it we have a little bit of flour

for dusting and to keep it from sticking on our hands.

So rub just a little flour on your hands.

Okay.

And take your small pieces and with your dusted hands

just roll little balls.

Now this is where it's like play doh.

[Tanya] Yeah, this is really the fun stuff.

Yeah, this is what the kids love.

And we can put that maybe over here in front of me.

As we're doing this, we're only doing 16 pieces

and there's two of us so it's gonna only take

a couple minutes if that.

If we had a lot of these to do,

we would be putting them under a piece of plastic wrap

or a clean kitchen towel as we worked.

Okay, great.

Taking a little bit of your dusting flour

into the center of the table.

And just press it down lightly with the heel of your hand.

And then you're going to take your little rolling stick.

And you can get a dowel at Home Depot.

It doesn't have to be fancy like this one.

And just roll out.

Roll towards you and then do a quarter turn.

And then roll out.

Roll towards you.

And then do a quarter turn.

And it's starting to stick to my pin a little bit

so I'm, a little bit more dusting flour.

Start in the center of the dough.

Roll away from you, pick it up.

Put it back into the center.

Roll towards you and then do a quarter turn.

This will ensure that you have uniformity of shape.

You get a nice circle.

You see people that sort of randomly pushing the dough

around and they end up with a map of Afghanistan.

Exactly.

That isn't what we're trying to do here.

We'd like to try to get as close to a circle as possible.

[Tanya] What's the diameter of the circle?

About five or six inches would be common.

It's meant to be something that would help you

eat with your hands.

In India, it's still quite common for people

to eat with their fingers.

And so flatbreads or roti are the aid of choice.

Okay chef, so we'll roll out a couple more of these.

I'll turn the oil up so it'll be ready for us to cook

and when we come back in the next video

we'll just fry these guys up.

Okay, sounds good.

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