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NYT Syndicate
It is, at a glance, simple and unremarkable: a circle of flatbread as flaccid as a cotton cloth, with a texture not quite as doughy as pita bread, yet fluffier than a tortilla.
To a diner unfamiliar with the dish, it may look like an accessory, just a vehicle to get hearty helpings of meat and vegetables into the mouth. But roti, a staple of this West Indian island nation's cuisine, is anything but a culinary afterthought. It is so ingrained in the culture in Trinidad and Tobago that the term often refers to the bread combined with its accompaniments, typically a yellow curry stew of meat, potatoes and chickpeas.
When done right, this flatbread is silky and buttery and melts on the tongue in a puddle of succulent flavours. Preparing it, though, requires a lifetime of study.
Roti arrived on the island of Trinidad around the time slavery was abolished in the late 1830s, with indentured servants from India, where the unleavened flatbread has been popular for many centuries. Dhal puri, paratha and sada are the most readily available styles of roti in Trinidad.
Locals call their brand of paratha"buss up shut," which gets its name from the Trini pronunciation of the phrase"busted-up shirt," a reference to what the dish looks like. Unlike traditional paratha in India, buss up shut is broken into pieces, and diners typically pick up the pieces with their hands and use them as utensils to scoop the curry. Sada is comparable to naan bread (minus the leavening) and usually eaten at breakfast with a choka, which is roasted and ground vegetables or fish.
Dhal puri is a roti stuffed with ground split peas. It's large, round and flat, and it's often wrapped around curry so it can be eaten like a sandwich. While dhal puri is cooked on a griddle, the puri in India is deep-fried and smaller than the Trinidadian iteration, said Chitrita Banerji, the author of Eating India: An Odyssey Into the Food and Culture of the Land of Spices. The portability of a dhal puri (with curry inside) makes it a popular grab-and-go street food and lunch option.
Rostan Amin, 84, a Muslim Trinidadian whose ancestors are from India, began his roti empire with a grocery store in San Fernando in the 1960s. His roti appealed to the workers at a nearby oil refinery. The grocery store eventually closed, but the restaurant business has expanded. There are now 10 branches throughout the country.
The Amin family's restaurant looks much like any roti shop you may see around the globe, from New York City to Toronto. It is sparse, with a counter and a few wooden tables for those who want to stick around to eat.
Amin's son, Haseeb Amin, 57, who goes by Pope, and one of his grandsons, Kaleem Amin, 33, now run the operation, but the patriarch still puts in time ” he lives above the flagship restaurant and regularly wakes up early to knead the dough.
Kaleem Amin said he can tell his grandfather's work, as opposed to that of the staff."Sometimes, if I come in the morning, I would know the difference if my grandfather kneaded the flour, because when he kneads the flour, you don't even need to chew the roti," he said."It literally melts in your mouth."
How, exactly, does the elder Amin accomplish such a perfect knead?
The answer is what makes preparing the perfect roti so difficult for home cooks: experience.
"Unless you've grown up in the kind of community where somebody in your family was teaching you to do it since you were 7, it's going to be hard," said Anu Lakhan, a food writer in Trinidad.
Making roti is as much about eyeballing as measuring, tradition as instruction. Trinidadians see it as an art form. It's time consuming, and challenging,"because it was never documented in a manner in which people can duplicate it easily," said Chris De La Rosa, the founder of CaribbeanPot.com.
Those new to roti-making are often surprised by how difficult it is, as cookbook instructions are straightforward and ingredients are few: flour, water, salt, baking powder and oil as its base, with seasonings and additions, depending on the style.
De La Rosa's cooking website supplements recipes with videos to help illustrate what the prose cannot. A native of Trinidad, De La Rosa now lives in Hamilton, Ontario. His site started as a way to teach his daughters how to prepare some of his favourite Caribbean dishes.
Portioning ingredients correctly is an important first step in achieving the right roti texture. The slightest ratio imbalance could throw off the roti. What you want is a very soft dough, Kaleem Amin said, but not so soft that it breaks apart. His father, Pope Amin, said that when mixing the dough, you know it is ready when you can stick your finger in it and your finger comes out clean.
With dhal puri, the well-seasoned split-pea filling, which provides the flavour, is just as important as supple dough.
The split peas must be boiled to the correct texture, not too mushy and not too hard, Pope Amin said. When pinched with the fingers, a perfectly boiled split pea will crumble into a chalky paste. The peas are then ground into a fine powder with culantro (an intense, cilantro-like seasoning called chadon beni here), cumin, turmeric, garlic and salt.
Stuffing the dhal puri requires dexterity. A handful of the split-pea powder is piled onto a slightly flattened ball of dough. One hand packs the filling, while the other squeezes the dough, as if wrapping a baby in a blanket. It is important that the dough is pinched and sealed so that the filling does not spill out when it is flattened into a large, thin circle with a rolling pin.
From there, the dough is plopped onto a tawa, a large cast-iron griddle. The dough is oiled, flipped and oiled again. It should take only about 30 seconds to cook, turning it a light brown on both sides. When air bubbles inflate the dough as it heats on the griddle, that's a sign it is ready.
For home cooks, a nonstick frying pan could be used in place of a tawa, De La Rosa said.
Then comes the easy part: wrapping the roti around generous portions of curry to eat like a burrito, or tearing off pieces of roti and using them to scoop curry into your mouth.
