Chrissy Makes Curried Chickpea Roti

[clapping]

And it goes crazy.

See, it even breaks.

That's part of the clapping.

The point is now you have like these flaky roti layers.

It literally looks like a ripped up T-shirt.

[laughing]

[relaxing tropical music]

[laughing]

Today we are going to make some curry chickpeas and roti,

Caribbean style.

Both these recipes are very near and dear to me.

I grew up on curry.

Roti was at every family gathering.

I mean, it's delicious, it's buttery, it's flaky.

Every culture has their flatbread.

Every culture has their curry.

But I'm gonna show you

how I do it the Jamaican and Trinidadian way.

[mellow music]

To start, we've got our all purpose flour here.

I'm just gonna go ahead

and add the rest of our dry ingredients.

So starting with the baking powder

and then I'm going to add a little bit of salt.

Also adding some instant yeast to our dough today

because it reacts a little bit faster.

I'm going to give this a good stir once over

to just make sure all

of the dry ingredients are well combined.

This is only the beginning.

The best part is buttering the roti

because I treat it like it's a palette for paint.

I don't know how else to describe it. I just love it.

The more I can get my hands involved with cooking,

the happier I am, always.

Okay, so now slowly add in some water.

I like to add water to the center just

so that it creates a doughy well.

The dough will start to kind of pull apart.

So I'm just gonna go in there with my hands now.

It's really soft, very supple.

So you'll kinda know if you need more water

if you see a lot of extra flour

that's not incorporating into your ball of dough.

You can just add a little bit of water at a time.

We don't want our dough to be too wet.

What I'm doing today is buss up shut,

which is like busted up shirt

in the islands 'cause the the way the roti looks when it,

when the layers are created

by clapping the dough makes it look like a busted shirt.

So that's what we're gonna be doing today.

You'll know your dough is ready for resting.

Once it kinda all comes together,

it's soft, supple.

There's nothing really sticking to your hands anymore.

The next step would just be to lightly oil the same dish

and brush some olive oil.

Any oil will do.

You just don't want the dough to stick

to the bottom of the mixing bowl.

So now that our dough is ready, I'm just going to cover it

with a tea towel and we'll leave it at room temperature

to just sit for about 15 to 20 minutes.

It'll rise very slightly and become a little more soft

and supple as the gluten strands develop.

So now we're just going to move on

to getting started on our curry.

[upbeat music]

This dish is gonna start out with some fresh veggies.

Scallion, which is just honestly a staple

to pretty much every single Jamaican dish I've ever had.

Us Jamaicans call it escallion.

I don't know why they put the E in front.

That's what we call it.

[upbeat jazz music]

Garlic, of course.

Ginger.

Gonna use half the onion.

[upbeat jazz music]

And a sweet potato.

I think it adds a really nice subtle sweetness

that balances out really well

with the spiciness of the dish.

Cubes are not important to anything other than the fact

that you want to make sure the sweet potato

cooks down evenly in this dish.

So we've pre-chopped all of our vegetables

and we've got our chickpeas and our spices arranged.

Now we can get right into making the curry.

It starts by adding olive oil to our pot

and we're going to start it off on medium heat.

Talk about the frickin' spicy Scotch bonnet pepper

that makes a comeback in every one of my videos.

This is a such a spicy yet slightly sweet pepper.

A few weeks ago I made curry for my boyfriend's family

and I forgot to take this out.

That is every Jamaican's worst nightmare.

Somebody left the Scotch bonnet in.

He consumed this entire pepper.

I felt so bad, it was so hot, but it's so delicious.

So definitely worth it but don't forget.

Add our onion now.

I'm just gonna add some Jamaican curry powder to the dish.

I don't know why,

but it was taught to me that you always burn the curry.

You always, you know,

fry the curry first or else it'll give you a stomachache.

Now I, that is old Jamaican fable.

I don't know if that's true or not.

I just listened to what,

I just do what they say.

So I'm just gonna go ahead and add my garlic,

our scallion as well.

We're gonna also now add our chickpeas.

The reason we're adding our chickpeas now is

so that they can kind of soak in all those flavors

'cause chickpeas are pretty plain on their own.

Salt and I'm adding a little bit of a brown sugar as well.

That's what Jamaicans use.

It just has a really nice flavor profile

that you just can't get with regular refined sugars.

I'm just gonna do a little bit of black pepper.

I'm gonna add the Scotch bonnet and the thyme

to the dish now and our whole piece of ginger.

The reason we're using the whole piece is we don't want this

to be like a very ginger forward dish,

but we do want that subtle flavor of the ginger.

We're gonna take that out at the end

as well as the Scotch bonnet pepper.

Vinegar.

That just adds a little bit of acidity.

Gonna add some of this vegetable broth.

Not all of it.

Add the sweet potatoes.

And essentially all we're looking

for here is for the sweet potato cubes

to be immersed in the liquid

so that they can cook down.

We just want to cover all of our bases.

So that's why I kind of drowned them into the stew itself.

I forgot the pot lid.

[melancholy music]

You'll just want to watch it.

We wanna make sure the sweet potatoes

are fork tender after that time period

and that's how you know your curry's ready.

So let's get into making the roti.

Fun part.

[upbeat music]

So while our chickpea curry is simmering,

our dough has set for about 20 minutes now.

We're just going to uncover that.

It's risen a little bit in that timeframe.

The first thing we're gonna do

is just lightly flour our surface.

Oh my God, it's so soft.

What I'm doing is just creating an oblong shape here.

What we want are five sections

so we can make five pieces of roti

and we're just gonna cut that into five sections.

I have this bread bowl here while I work with the roti.

I'm just going to set the pieces

that I'm not rolling out aside.

And again, a light flour to the surface.

I'm just using my fingers to shape out a small circle.

This is my favorite kitchen utensil.

I feel like I could really get in there

with my hands and my body when I use this

as compared to like a really large one.

So I'm just gonna start by rolling out one way

and you'll see like air pockets kind

of start to begin to show up underneath the dough.

If you see there's like light bubbling coming up

to the surface,

that's how you know it's thin enough

in whatever area you're working.

I used to work in the pizza capital of the world.

New Haven, Connecticut.

Maybe we'll do pizza this summer.

We have our melted butter and a brush.

We're going to take that brush

and Bob Ross the roti.

All that means is you're gonna paint it.

What I'm doing now is just taking a knife

and cutting a little incision.

All we're gonna do is fold this over in a tight cone.

All the way around.

This part's so fun.

I'm telling you,

this is what makes the roti making process so fun to me.

The butter is pooling out.

That's a success.

All we wanna do now is tuck the ends into themselves.

It's no longer a cone.

The tighter the roll the better.

All that butter is gonna get in the center.

It's like a huge tortellini.

We're almost there, guys.

This one's really, really working with me.

I like it.

[upbeat jazz music]

Awesome.

Our roti is sitting in a bread bowl.

We're gonna let it sit for a few minutes to just rest

and allow that butter to combine with the dough.

Cover it with this like bonnet like thing.

You want it covered so that the dough doesn't dry out.

I'm just gonna set that aside.

Then we can go check on our curries.

Oh yeah, that looks good.

Let's test.

Yup, fork tender, baby.

Ready to go.

So I'm just gonna go ahead

and add that coconut milk over the top.

If you don't like heat,

it also cools down the dish a bit.

At this point before I stir any further,

I'm gonna take out the Scotch bonnet pepper,

which is, ooh, it has like wilted a bit.

We're just gonna set that aside.

I'm also gonna to take out any thyme.

I really don't like eating a whole piece of thyme.

We'll find that ginger and take that out as well.

So we've now turned off the heat

for our curry and we're just gonna cover it

so that it can retain the heat.

We're gonna head back over to the counter

to roll out our roti,

which has set now for about 15 minutes.

So again, lightly flouring our surface.

Things are gonna get a little buttery over here.

Again, creating a circular shape with my dough.

We're gonna want to roll this out thinly but not too thin,

because we don't want it to extend out of our tawa.

So although this looks like you know,

just one layer of dough,

it's actually multiple layers

that are getting flattened out.

Fun stuff.

This looks good to me.

So we can set that aside until we're ready to use it.

Our tawa is really heated through now.

Honestly, you can order a crepe pan offline

and that'll do the same thing.

You just want that flat surface area

that gets really heated.

You want the oil to be shimmery

and I'm gonna turn up the heat to medium.

We're just gonna place our roti on the skillet.

Perfect.

So we're just gonna flip that

and I'm just flipping with my hand.

You essentially just want to flip it every 30 seconds

until it's browned perfectly.

You don't need perfect browning

but I'm gonna flip this once more

because the other side is looking exactly how I want it to.

See there's some brown spots there.

I just want the other side to be a little bit more brown.

So we'll let that sit.

But this is how you know it's ready.

Once both sides kinda look like that.

So I'm gonna remove this from the heat now.

It's perfect.

We're gonna get it into kind of like our bowl again

that we set the roti in originally.

You can already see it's already busting on itself.

All right, this bad boy is ready.

So now we can clap this ish.

We're gonna take our hot roti pieces and just clap it.

[clapping]

And it goes crazy.

See, it even breaks.

That's part of the clapping.

The point is now you have like these flaky roti layers.

It is a messy process.

I don't mind making a mess.

If you don't wanna do this,

you could just also just throw a roti

into a Tupperware with a lid and shake it.

I bust up the roti

because that's like the traditional way to do it.

It reveals all of the flaky layers

that have been created from the butter.

What I love about it is that

when you're eating this with curry,

the curry will seep into those little crevices

and those layers,

and it'll just make for a really delicious meal.

So let's plate this curry and roti.

I'm just gonna remove the top.

The curry is still steaming, piping hot.

I'm just gonna plate right on top of the roti.

Just like that.

Little bit of scallion for garnish.

So I'm gonna go in and take a nice bite of this roti.

I'm gonna push some of that off

'cause there's a lot going on here.

It's gonna be a big bite.

That's doing it for me right now.

And I've been eating curry nonstop for like 10 days now.

Really, really pleased with how this dish came out.

You've got the sweet, the savory,

the slightly spicy.

Easy weeknight dinner,

easy dinner to scale up.

If you've never tried curry before,

this one's easy enough to try at home.

I'll be looking for you guys to make this.

So like,

let me know if I made your best roti dreams

come true or not.

I don't know.

[laughing]

[upbeat music ends]

[Woman] Can you do the rest

of this video in your Stewie voice?

Oh, there was an episode of Family Guy

where Stewie was vegetarian and he shows up to a cookout.

He's like, Just wondering,

do you have a space on the grill specifically

for my veggie burger?

And I was like, damn it.

This is me every day.