It is one of the most popular unleavened flat-breads in Indian cuisine, Pakistani cuisine and Bengali cuisine and is made by pan frying whole-wheat dough on a tava. Parathas are usually stuffed with vegetables such as boiled potatoes, leaf vegetables, radishes or cauliflower and/or paneer (South Asian cheese). A paratha (especially a stuffed one) can be eaten simply with a blob of butter spread on
top, with chutney, with pickles and yogurt, or with meat or vegetable curries. Some roll the paratha into a tube and eat it with tea, often dipping the paratha into the tea. The paratha can be round, heptagonal, square or triangular. In the former, the stuffing is mixed with the kneaded flour and the paratha is prepared as roti is, but in the latter two, the peda (ball of kneaded flour) is flattened into a circle, the stuffing is kept in the middle and the flatbread is closed around the stuffing like an envelope. The latter two also vary from the first in that, while the former is like a thick (in terms of width) version of the roti with filling inside, the latter two have discernible soft layers if one "opens" the crispier shell layers.
