Bread Atlas · Bread
Laminated Roti Canai
- Advanced
- 50 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, char used as punctuation.
Ingredients
- 500 g plain white flour
- 260 g water at 24C (75F)
- 1 egg, 55 g
- 30 g sweetened condensed milk
- 8 g fine salt
- 5 g sugar
- 150 g ghee, melted, for coating and cooking
Equipment
Sheet pan
The skills inside
LaminationGriddle & plancha work
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy · egg
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Whisk the water, egg, condensed milk, salt and sugar together, stir in the flour, then knead 10-12 minutes until the dough is satiny and a pulled piece thins to a film before tearing. 12 min
- Divide into 8 balls of about 105 g, roll each in melted ghee and set them well apart in a tray with more ghee poured over so they sit half submerged. Cover and rest 6-8 hours at 22C (72F) until they are slack and floppy and hold a fingerprint. 480 min
- On a lightly oiled bench flatten a ball with the heel of your hand, then flip and slap it outward until it is a sheet about 50 cm across that you can read newsprint through. Tears smaller than a coin do not matter.
- Fold the far edge in repeatedly to make a long band, coil the band into a flat spiral and tuck the tail underneath. Rest the coils 10 minutes so the gluten lets go. 10 min
- Press a coil to a 20 cm disc, cook on a griddle at 200C (390F) in a little ghee for about 2 minutes a side until deeply blistered, then clap it between your palms so the layers shatter apart. 2 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Griddle & plancha work 45 recipes
- Full contact with the metal: the food lies flat, with no dome in the middle and no curled edge lifting it away, so browning reaches the entire face rather than a ring of it.
- Contact is immediate and audible, and the food stays where it is put rather than sliding around in a slick of its own released liquid.
- The cooked face is an unbroken sheet of even colour: the whole surface browned, not a pattern of marks with pale ground between them, and not a dark centre with pale corners.
- The metal around the food is dry: no spreading wet patch steaming out from under it, nothing weeping onto the surface and boiling there.
- Turned once or twice and no more, and lifted while the crust is still brown: a piece flipped repeatedly never holds heat long enough to build one.
Where it goes wrong The surface was crowded and its temperature crashed, so everything gave up its water at once and stewed on the metal: pale, damp, grey at the edges, and stuck fast where the crust never got the chance to form.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Grüner Veltliner
- Also Right
- Vermentino or dry Chenin
- From the Taps
- Saison
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with citrus & herbs
The vegetable whisperers: peppery, high-acid whites that flatter greens, roots, and grains without bullying them.
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