Subah Saraf shares three ways to make healthier chapati: use whole wheat flour ground fresh at a chakki without sieving, mix 50% vegetables like spinach or beetroot into the dough, and cook on uncoated clay instead of metal. She credits these changes to curing her thyroid issues, PCOD, and hair loss.
Hi, I'm Subha. I'm journeying through the ways we can live a life more in sync with nature and then sharing it with you. Lately, I've been learning about the food system. We make about 200 decisions about food every day, and majority of these decisions are unconscious to us. In this video, I'm going to talk about something that is a staple for every Indian— chapati. I'll share with you 3 ways you can prepare a healthier, a more digestible version of chapati, and by switching to these kinds of chapatis incorporated with other food and lifestyle changes, Of course, I was able to cure my thyroid, PCOD, and hair fall without any medicine. And now I want to share this knowledge with you because I feel that there's no reason why such precious knowledge about food and health should be kept a secret from anyone. So let's start. Number one: Use only whole wheat flour. Wheat is something we've been eating for thousands of years, but the chapatis that our ancestors ate were very different from what we eat today. In those days, flour used to be made by grinding wheat between two big stones, and this kind of flour was called Whole wheat. It contained the seed, the bran, and the germ. But today, in the modern day, we remove the bran and only consume the inside part. By doing this, we're completely changing its natural state from the way that nature has designed it for us to eat. The nutrients, the vitamins, all the important things that your body needed to make the inner seed digest is left behind in the bran that we decided to throw away because we wanted the flour to have a softer texture, a longer shelf life. So although we're making the flour last, we're completely ruining it Now you must be like, okay, okay, enough of these facts and knowledge, tell me what should I do? If you want to consume wheat flour, consume only whole wheat flour. The best is to buy your own whole wheat and grind it in a mill at your own home. Now you must be like, come on, it's 2017, we don't have mills at our homes. I get it, I don't either. In this case, buy your own whole wheat and get it ground at an outside mill, aka at a chakki. You can easily find chakkis in local Indian markets. Remember not to sieve the flour before making the dough. The sieving process actually takes off the bran from the flour and then creates the whole long process of making it less digestible. Number 2, combine your chapati with 50% vegetable. This means that if you're using 100% wheat flour right now, start using 50% wheat flour and 50% vegetable. The vegetable can be any— ridge gourd, ghee, ash gourd, spinach, carrot, coriander, mint, radish, methi, beetroot, cucumber— anything! You can even combine 2 vegetables together. So let's say you're making beetroot chapati. To make this, take 1 cup of shredded beetroot and 1 cup of wheat flour, combine it together to form a dough, and then continue how you would make a normal roti. I have to admit, I can't make perfect shaped rotis because I just learnt it from my mom. Then heat the tawa and cook the roti on a low flame. Don't use any oil or ghee. This type of roti digests very quickly and is much more nutrient-rich. Similarly, you can make spinach chapati. For this, I used 1 cup of shredded spinach and 1 cup of flour, and then combined it to form a dough. You can add some water if it's too dry. In fact, you'll need to. And then you know the process. You can also make cucumber chapati. For this, I used 1 cup of pureed cucumber and 1 cup of flour. Once again, I combined it together to form a dough and then followed the same old process of making a chapati. So what's the reason for combining vegetables? Well, we in the modern day spend most of our day sitting down. People go right from sitting on the bed to sitting on the toilet, after which they eat breakfast sitting at a dining table, and then they sit in a car as they drive to work, and then they spend the entire day sitting at a desk. And then they sit in a car to drive back home, and then they crawl back into bed. With these kinds of lifestyles, we're not even capable of digesting wheat on its own. But when we combine it with vegetable, the roti becomes digestible. So many people have stomach-related disorders, ulcers, constipation. Why? Because they're not even able to digest roti, which they're eating every single day. So this way, even if you're eating 2 chapatis, the wheat or the grain of only 1 chapati is going inside your body. But this doesn't mean that you start eating double the number of rotis. If you usually eat one chapati, eat two bowls of vegetable or sabzi. If you eat two chapatis, eat four bowls of vegetable or sabzi. The idea is to eat less grain and more vegetable. Number three: ditch the metal and start using clayware, aka mitti ke bartan. The ingredients in your food matter a lot, but you know what's one thing that matters just as much? The utensils that you're using to cook that food. Our ancestors all used mitti ke vatan for cooking their food, and that's one reason they didn't suffer from all the diseases that we do today. Also, cooking on a clay tawa retains a lot of nutrients in the roti. Aluminium metal tawas are coated with toxic chemicals which eventually lead up to your stomach and lead to a lot of toxic accumulation over time. Okay, yes, I agree that cooking on a clay tawa requires more time, but it's hardly 2 extra minutes. And if those 2 extra minutes are giving you better health— in fact, if they're ensuring you better health, then what's the big deal? You can find clayware very easily in Indian streets. It's available in all kinds of Indian markets, or else you can order it on Amazon. I've left a few links in the description below. Just make sure that you buy the non-coated ones. I can promise you that once you start eating these vegetable rotis, you'll find it very difficult to go back to eating the normal styled old rotis because these vegetable ones just feel much lighter and they even taste so much better. You can make a new flavored roti every day. It's amazing. If you liked what I shared, please give this video a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you again very soon.
