I’m not sure why it took me five years to use Indian chakki atta to make chapatis. I can concoct a few explanations in my defence. The brands exporting the stuff primarily trade in large quantities. Even though I grew up in a household where we usually ate rice for lunch and chapatis or bread for dinner, the idea of buying a five-kilo packet felt daunting. In my kitchen here in Tramin, the cuisine flits between Goan, Indian, South Tyrolian, and Italian. One day, I’ll be cooking a bone marrow soup, the way my father-in-law makes it, the next a pasta with radicchio, speck and gorgonzola or a risotto with foraged porcini mushrooms and white wine. Somewhere mid-week, I may make prawn curry with rice or peas pulao with dal. I enjoy playing with local ingredients, especially vegetables I’ve never eaten before, like rattlesnake beans — a recent discovery. The experimental cook in me loves the idea of understanding how I might use what is available to me here to make approximations of what I’ve cooked with ease back home in India. For these are other reasons connected with childcare, for the longest time, I simply used Italian wholewheat flour to make chapatis. Sometimes I’d lighten the density of the dough by mixing it with spelt flour. I have successfully used this combination to make everything from poie to paranthas and rotis to chapatis as well as puris. I’ve been fairly pleased with the outcome.

Recently, though, having understood that we are a household that enjoys eating rice, I decided to order a large quantity from an online retailer that has its warehouse in the EU region. I discovered they had the option of a five-kilo pack of flour. Since the shipping was free, I wouldn’t have to worry about lugging it into the car, then out, then up the stairs, I put it in my ‘cart’, along with a few items I don’t often find in the ‘oriental’ shops near me, like podi, lasun chutney and pani puri masala. For months, the atta was lying in our tiny pantry, because, unlike the other South Asians living here, I don’t have a large enough drum to contain such a large quantity, nor do I have so much space in my apartment. A week ago, when I finally made some time to reorganise my spice drawers and stock the masala boxes I had gifted myself, I took out about half a kilo of the chakki atta into a glass container that still bore the label ‘dal for sambhar’.