Indian Recipes
Chapatis
Soft wholewheat flatbreads cooked on a hot dry pan until they puff: the everyday bread of much of India.
- Serves 8
- Rest 20 min
- Cook about 20 min
- Indian
Method
Mix the flour and salt in a large bowl and rub in the oil. Add the warm water a little at a time, mixing with your hand, until the dough comes together. You may not need it all.
Knead on a lightly floured surface for 6–8 minutes until soft, smooth and slightly springy; it should be softer than bread dough. Cover and leave to rest for at least 20 minutes (up to 2 hours).
Divide into 8 equal balls. Dust one with flour and roll it out into a thin circle about 15–18 cm across, turning it as you go and dusting with a little flour if it sticks.
Heat a tawa or heavy frying pan over a medium-high heat. Lay the chapati in the dry pan and cook for 30–40 seconds until small bubbles appear, then turn it over and cook for about 1 minute until brown spots appear underneath.
Turn it again and press gently around the edges with a folded tea towel; it should puff up. (Or hold it with tongs over a gas flame for a few seconds.) Brush with ghee if you like and keep warm, wrapped in a clean tea towel, while you cook the rest.
Tip: tap a step to tick it off as you cook.
Chef’s notes
- Wrapped in a tea towel inside a container, chapatis stay soft for a few hours. Reheat briefly in a dry pan.
How this recipe was developed
The old Cookeryonline page reproduced a published recipe, so we wrote a new one. We followed the two most widely used home methods for soft chapatis.
- Soft dough and a rest. Swasthi Shreekanth rests the dough for at least 30 minutes; Hebbar’s Kitchen warns against heavy-handed kneading. Both aim for a soft dough that rolls thinly.
- To puff or not. Swasthi explains that a chapati may or may not puff (the fully puffed, flame-cooked bread is a phulka); we give the tea-towel press and the gas-flame method as options.
Sources we compared (ratings as shown on each site on 31 October 2026):
- Swasthi's Recipes (Swasthi Shreekanth): Chapati
- Hebbar's Kitchen (Archana Hebbar): Soft chapati / roti
This is an original Cookeryonline recipe written in our own words. Ingredient choices and techniques are credited above; no source text has been copied.