Whenever I think of my Aunt Rachna, I imagine her making aloo paratha, a fluffy, savory Indian bread stuffed to the brim with potatoes.
In her big, open kitchen in Dallas, she tosses a few rough-edged russets into a pot of boiling water, and as soon as the potatoes are soft enough to be easily pierced with a fork, she plucks them out, peels them and mashes them in a bowl until they’re smooth and satiny, mixing in salt, red chile powder and crushed fennel seeds, which fill the room with a heady, sweet aroma. She divides them into baseball-size spheres and then, in a separate bowl, combines wheat flour, oil and water to make small circles of dough. The next step is like magic: She encloses one of the enormous potato balls into a disc of dough, like a parcel, rolls it all out, and the two become one — a paper-thin layer of dough outlining a bulky, piquant layer of potatoes. She quickly pan-fries the parathas, basting them with oil until they are blistered and glistening, and sets them on a plate, ready for me to devour while they’re still steaming.
Many aloo parathas are mostly dough, with just a small amount of potato. But Rachna always taught me that this ratio should be flipped. The potato is the delivery vehicle for most of the flavor. Without it, the paratha is less exciting.
Growing up in an Indian vegetarian household, I deeply understood the power of the potato. And it wasn’t just because of Rachna’s lush aloo parathas. Potatoes figure heavily in many aspects of Indian cuisine and have always been a staple of my family’s meals — boiled, baked, pan-fried, smashed and anything in between. My mom’s go-to weeknight dish is aloo gobhi: roasted, charred potatoes and cauliflower coated in turmeric, ginger and onions. Her preferred appetizer for entertaining is baked miniature potatoes topped with sour cream and a tangy and bright combination of chaat masala, cilantro, onions, ginger and green chiles. My Aunt Sonia is famous in our family for her pav bhaji, an ingeniously comforting carb-on-carb Mumbai street food featuring buttered buns topped with a spicy, coriander-heavy mashed potato gravy. When I was writing my cookbook, “Indian-ish,” potatoes were such a recurring star in my recipes that I considered dedicating an entire chapter to them.