Chane ki Dal ka Paratha - Indian flat bread stuffed with chickpeas

A delicious chickpea-variation of the usual Indian Paratha. Try it and you will love it!

How to make Chane ki Dal ka Paratha?

The very first thing you need to do is to soak your split chickpeas the night before you would like to prepare this dish. In the morning you can throw away the water and wash the chickpeas properly.

Before we go on with the preparation of the chickpeas, which will be the stuffing, we will first make the dough. Put the flour into a bowl and start mixing it with your hand while adding a bit of water. Bit by bit you add more and more water to it. It will take some time and a bit of effort to make a nice dough out of this combination. You can add ½ tablespoon oil to make it smoother but you will need to knead the dough properly and with strength until it is a soft mass. When you now poke a finger into it, it should come back up and fill the deep hole that you have made. When this is the case, your dough is prepared and you can get back to making the stuffing.

Take the chickpeas and use a blender to make it a paste. If the chickpeas are not fully soaked through, you may have to add a little bit of water. Now you heat up two tablespoons of ghee in a wok or in a deep pan. Once the ghee is hot, you add cumin and after half a minute also your chickpea paste. Fry the paste for five minutes until it gets a golden shine. Add coriander, garam masala, mango powder and finally salt on top and stir some more. Finally you can switch that stove off and get the mixture out into a bowl.

Now we will start rolling the bread. Separate your bread dough into small pieces which you roll into balls. They should easily fit into the palm of your hand. Do the same thing with the chickpea paste and make sure that you have the same amount of chickpea balls as dough balls. When you have thus arranged the size of the balls, you take one dough ball and roll it once more in the palms of both hands and finally press it a little bit flat with the palms. Dip it once into some extra flour so that it does not stick to your hands. Then you use your fingers to help make that piece of dough into a small bowl-like form into which you can then place one of the chickpea balls. After this you carefully wrap the dough around the chickpeas.

Again you have a ball now, a chickpea-filled dough ball which you have to roll out to a flat bread. Pat the ball carefully flat and then start rolling until it is a round bread of a thickness of about 3 millimeters. If you have a helper with the stuffing and the rolling, you can now switch on your stove, place a pan on top and put the paratha on top of it. Let one side bake and after a minute turn the bread to bake the other side. Spread a little bit of ghee with a spoon on the baked side and turn it around again. Once more you will need to turn and you can press a bit with your spoon on the places where the bread still needs to be baked. Once it is golden everywhere take it off the pan and put the next one on.

Just another tip before you serve them: eat them by hand and while they are hot! Enjoy!