Chapati [chuh-pah-tee] noun: Pan-grilled unleavened flatbread eaten in India, East Africa, and most of South Asia.
Chapati is ubiquitous in Kenya; big golden wedges of this flat, chewy bread were served at almost every meal. We loved it; the fried golden taste is so delicious, and it's handy for sopping up extra meat and sauce. We were already familiar, too, with chapati from Indian cuisine. But we quickly realized that what the Kenyans called chapati was something different; it's not analogous to the familiar Indian style of chapati at all.
Indian-style chapati (or chapathi) is a very, very flat sort of bread, like a tortilla. The Kenyan style of chapati is slightly thicker, with flaky layers, and in most Indian restaurants this type of flatbread would be called paratha -- not chapati.
The difference between these types of flatbread comes in how the dough is handled. Paratha recipes (as well as most of the Kenyan chapati recipes we've looked at so far) call for rolling out the dough into a long thin strand. Then the strand is coiled into a round shape and rolled until flat. This coiling process creates those flaky layers. Some do it differently: they create a cone shape of the dough and repeatedly fold it and roll it flat.
But the end result is the same: slightly thickened flatbread with flaky golden layers. Hard to argue with that, whatever you call it! It's delicious, rather easy, and a staple of homestyle Kenyan cooking. We're going to try making them soon! (Oh, and apparently they're one of President Obama's favorite foods, too.)
Have you ever made chapati?
More Kenyan cooking:
• Word of Mouth: Sukuma Wiki
• Word of Mouth: Ugali
• Word of Mouth: Irio
(Image: Faith Durand)
5 Things Paris Taught Me About Travel
Recipe: Ham, Cheddar & Chive Egg Bakes
Good Food to Share 
The Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces 
Apartment Therapy Presents 
The Eight-Step Home Cure 
Bacsac Bacsquare 04...
Apartment Therapy's Sofa Shopping Guide
Nikki’s Sweet and Cheery Print Studio
We make em all the time. Here's the easy recipe. Bittman also did a post on them a while back on his Bitten blog. I would be interested to try the Kenyan style though. Excellent part of breakfast when you want some hot bread thing and don't have any in the house.
I am THE worst, most inept baker you can imagine (good cook, terrible baker), and I can make these. Make them well. Make them often. They are delish.
trader joe's used to sell these and they were so delicious! but then they suddenly stopped selling it...at least, i havent seen these in quite some time. good to know they're easy to make.
this is basically the same recipe as the chinese onion breads. yaobing. you make this recipe and chop up some green onion into the dough. it always reminded me of native american fry bread whenever i ate it in china (except better because it wasn't dripping in honey). yum!
Parathas are my favorite...I live in Pakistan and eat parathas and a over easy egg for breakfast all the time if I'm at home...if I'm on the run I make a paratha breakfast sandwich with scrambled eggs and any sauteed veggies around the kitchen (a little messy, but AMAZING). In fact I think I may just have to leave work early and go have one! thanks....
My chapati (Indian-style) were horrible: tough and dry. My Kenyan friend and her cousin have promised me a hands-on tutorial on making (Kenyan) chapatis though, so I hope to master them soon.
Just wondering when you will be getting to samosas in your Kenyan food odyssey.
These are delicious. If you're in NYC, Kam Man Supermarket in Chinatown sells these "Parathas" in their freezer section for <$1.50
I used to get them all the time.. until I realized how much much fat they contain. Now, they're an occasional treat.
I live in Kenya, married to a Sikh guy. The Gujaratis out here make amazing chapati - super thin and soft without adding any fat! The key is a fresh atta flour and getting the chapati to puff up on the hot tawa. It helps to let the dough stand for at least 30min...
I studied abroad in Kenya in college, and loved chapatis so much that my last day there, I bought a real cast iron chapati pan and a rolling pin. It's been a few years since I tried to make a chapati and I no longer have the pan, but this made me very excited about trying again!
I love this kind of bread and WM carries Naan at least. Chinese bread is very different in my opinon. It is softer and created from a long cord of dough which is made into a round by creating a spiral. It is then fried. Delicious. If I want a crispy flatbread, I just take a flour tortilla and fry it in margarine until it is crispy. Fry bread in New Mexico that has honey is called a sopa. They are about 3 or 4 inches in size and puff up when they are deep fried to create a big bubble in the middle. They serve a basket of these when you order in the restaurants along with honey in a squeeze bottle. We used to make them (sopas) with white flour and the flower from the cattail reeds we would find by small creeks and rivers. Native American fry bread is similar to a large flour tortilla but thicker and bigger and sometimes contain lard. It is filled usually with ground beef, lettuce, tomato and cheese. Wonderful! Unlike the chapati, these other breads contain baking soda or baking powder. However, in my opinion, the Kenyan chapati can be used in almost all the ways mentioned here.