: Does it make sense to refrigerate the dough made for Parathas to be used after 8 hours? Paratha: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paratha Flour: Wheat flour Dough ingredients: Water Salt Wheat flour I am planning to make

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Parathas are not chapatis.

I went to a restaurant in Funchal, Madeira once, and asked for a naan with my meal. The "naan" they served me was best described as the thickest chapati I have ever seen. i asked for a couple of chapatis to augment it.

You have to work with local opinion as to "what is and what is not" a bread form, but a paratha HAS to contain sufficient fat to fry itself on a tava. Whether the fat is butter, ghee, or the compound stuff based on Canola that gets marked as "vegetable ghee", a paratha needs to present that fried brown surface that says it contains oil. Chapatis don't contain oil, unless you get them from my friend Ashok, who makes WICKED deep fried chapatis.

To start the job early and simplify the matter, you can mix the oil with the flour and refrigerate that. Add dried onion if you're going that way. Then at a later point you can add water and roll out the stuff to make your parathas - two thin layers pressed together if you want to stuff them with pickles, one thick layer if you serve them "as is" with the pickles on the side.

If you want to do this classically, you use the oil from Indian oil pickles in your parathas. If you want to impress your prospective in-laws, you use Methi Gulcha pickle as stuffing and as a source of oil. That's your Paratha Achari classico. Me scusi ...

Edit: My wife says I'm not telling it how I do it. So the black Gulcha, I take the stones out - the green ones are usually pitted. And yes, I use pitted olives if I can't get gulcha, but they have a stronger taste. And if I can't get pickled gulcha, I use lime pickle or aubergine pickle. WTH I buy the parathas frozen from a local supermarket or Tesco, plain, with onion, or with garlic. I last made my own parathas somewhere around 1988, except at Christmas when I make everything from scratch.

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You should have no problem refrigerating the dough. I have done it with chapatti dough, which is essentially the same thing, without a problem. It's only flour, water and salt after all. You might find it a little hard to roll out straight from the fridge but nothing some brute force and ignorance (or letting it warm up a little) won't cure.