Food coma: The perfect phulkas and redeeming myself in my mother’s kitchen

It was a soggy mess. I stood in the kitchen, the gooey stuff stuck to my fingers, feeling like an abysmal failure. But my mother was kind. She deftly added dry flour to the bowl and demonstrated how to salvage the geela and dheela atta – the wet and loose dough.

The next part of the exercise was more up my alley. As an arts and crafts kid, I found that rolling the atta came easy to me. In fact, to my mother’s delight, the rotis came out perfectly round.

Since that early initiation into the art of making rotis at the age of 11, or maybe 12, I have done well, acquiring a reputation in the family for making the best phulkas.

Phulkas, for those not familiar with North Indian cooking, are the lightest and fluffiest kind of rotis – the kind that you get to eat mostly as part of home fare since dhabas and restaurants typically serve the fast-moving and less artful tandoori roti and tawa chapati.

To make a perfect phulka, you’ve got to learn to knead the atta right – neither too hard, nor too soft, just the right level of firm. Invest in a good chakla-belan – board and rolling pin – if you want to be able to roll out rotis without fuss.

While I’m terrible at sports, it is not for lack of motor coordination. I can ably shuffle a roti from hand to hand before landing it pitch perfect on the hot tawa.

And then comes the crucial part that makes a roti a phulka. After you’ve flipped it around on the tawa and allowed both sides to bake evenly, you take a cheemta – tongs – and transfer the roti from the tawa to an open flame. If it puffs up, it is a phulka.

The best phulkas, in my view, are soft in the middle and crispy on the edges – crisp, not burnt. Few things give me as much pleasure as adding a dollop of ghee to a puffed up phulka fresh off the flame and seeing it melt and drip down to the sides.

But the phulka is more than gastronomy for me. It is a lifesaver. It has helped me redeem myself in my mother’s kitchen. So what if I can’t emulate her mouthwatering dal, sabzi, kofta, halwa and more. She can count on me to make the phulkas. In fact, she claims mine are better than hers.