As fans of frozen takes on Indian food, the Trader Joe’s Malabari Paratha Authentic Indian Bread caught our eye. While this isn’t designed to be a full meal on its own, this Indian-style bread offers a world of possibilities for frozen food enthusiasts, without requiring the exhaustive process of actually baking the stuff from scratch.
In case you want to learn more about the name of this product, Trader Joe’s has a pretty good explanation on their website. Malabari refers to the Malabar region of Southern India where this bread is made, and Paratha means “layers of cooked flour.” Even if the title looked completely foreign to you at first, it should make a lot more sense now!
So let’s get into the cooking instructions. There are a couple different ways you can cook this, and we decided to use the stovetop method. This requires a little bit of oil and a flat pan, but it’s not difficult at all and takes just a few minutes. If you want to cook it in the microwave, you can do that as well, but we’re skeptical about how this would turn out when nuked. These come out of the bag looking pale and damp, but they brown a bit in the pan, which seems ideal for this paratha. (If you want to read the full cooking instructions straight off the bag, check out our package scans at the bottom of this article.)
Each paratha is about the size of a pancake, though they’re thinner. These aren’t quite as thin as, say, four tortillas, but we’d say they’re in the same general range for thickness. There’s a little bit of a flakiness to the paratha, though it’s subtler than a croissant would be, and there’s a lovely buttery flavor to it that we really enjoy. There’s just a hint of sweetness as well.
There are a million ways you could eat this paratha, and we’d definitely like to try making a pizza (or a quesadilla) using this as a base. A falafel wrap would probably be great on this as well. For the sake of this review, however, we decided on a simple snack, pairing our cooked paratha with a side of garlic hummus. The pairing was out of this world!
The package considers half a piece of bread to be a serving, which has 120 calories and 120 mg of sodium. This means that there would be 240 calories and 240 mg of sodium per piece of bread, plus whatever calories and sodium are in your choice of topping. We split this between two reviewers, and all five paratha were gone within ten minutes. You could definitely eat more than one in a sitting.
The Trader Joe’s Malabari Paratha Authentic Indian Bread offers a world of possibilities for creative meal-makers, but it’s also fantastic as a snack or side dish. We could eat it without any toppings at all, but a good hummus really makes this a crave-worthy treat. However you decide to eat these, we think you’ll find a lot to enjoy.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this Indian-style bread, check out our package scans below.
I make pizza with mine, buy the pizza sauce at trader Joe’s refrigerated very good and then add topping very tasty