Akki Rotti Recipe and Technique- Indian Flatbread from Leftover Rice

As a frugal person, there's a few parts when it comes to lowering food expenses. One big part is making sure to get the lowest prices for what you're buying, and sticking to lower cost meals. But another big part of frugal living is making sure that the food that you already have doesn't go to waste. The first part, I'm quite good at, if I may say so myself, but the latter is actually a big struggle of mine. Because I buy a lot of past prime produce, some of it goes off before I can get around to using it, but I'm ok with that because of how little I pay for it, and still overall my grocery bill is decently low.

But what bugs me more, the type of food waste that is most rampant in my house, is leftovers. You know how it is when you specifically make more food than is needed for one meal, because you want to be able to relax a bit and not live in the kitchen, so you make a larger amount to be able to serve at another meal as well? And then your kids decide that they had enough of it; one meal was enough for them and they have no interest in eating another meal with that item.
Tell me that doesn't just happen in my household.

Because leftovers go to waste far too often here, and it's just so frustrating. I don't want to have to fight with my kids "Eat this!" nor do I want to have to cook new meals when there's perfectly good food sitting in the refrigerator that will go in the garbage.

On top of that, I don't eat the same diet as my kids, so there's often things that I made for them leftover that I don't eat myself. Rice is a big one of them. I try to stay away from rice (I'm not perfect about it though) because it makes me gain weight, makes me bloated, and makes me exhausted, among other things, but when I have so much rice leftover that the kids are refusing to eat, it makes it hard for me to watch it spoil instead of eating it.

When I have plain white rice, that's easiest, because I can repurpose it into rice porridge, something my kids will happily eat any day (and request often). This last time, though, I had rice cooked in chicken broth and tomato juice, which therefore couldn't be repurposed into rice porridge. I made most of it into a soup, some blended with leftover sweet potatoes and leftover tomato soup and some unblended, and fortunately my kids all enjoyed the soup. I still had a decent amount of rice left and I knew if I made it into soup again I'd get kids complaining.

Then I had an idea, and googled to see if there was such a thing as Indian flatbread, made with cooked rice (dosas were what came to mind at first) and I found this video for akki rotti- exactly what I was looking for, with the added bonus of it being frugal, vegan, gluten free, etc!




I didn't follow this recipe and technique exactly, and I definitely did not have the same type of success. I used my blender to blend the cooked rice, and then used the blender dry jar to grind up the rice, but as I said in my review video, it doesn't get as fine as regular rice flour. On top of that, because I blended the rice in my blender instead of a food processor or grinder, I had to add water to blend it up instead of flour, so I was starting from a different place, already.

Here's how I did mine, but if you want something more authentic and more successful than mine, you can follow the instructions in the video.

1. Blend up your leftover rice with enough water so you get a thick paste. Mix in rice flour to make a workable dough.

2. Roll your dough into a log and coat it in rice flour.

3. Attempt to roll out a flat piece, coated in rice flour. If it holds together and you're able to pick it up, you're good to go, you're more successful than I am. (I could roll it out, but not pick it up and have it hold together once I did so.) If not, move on to the next step.

4. If rolling doesn't work for you, take balls of dough and press with the palm of your hand onto a flat surface, to make roughly palm sized flatbreads.

5. Using a metal spatula, slide the spatula under the flatbreads, loosening them from your flat surface, to be able to pick them up.

6. Heat up a frying pan or griddle. If you're using a cast iron one, make sure it is hot enough before moving on to the next step.

7. Place your rotti onto the frying pan/griddle, either after step 3, or after step 5.

8. When completely solidified, use your spatula to flip over the rotti, and cook it on the second side, until browned.

If you've made your rotti successfully like in the video, it should be a soft flatbread. My version? More similar in texture to tortilla chips. Either way, they're rather plain tasting and best with dips. The Indian version would be with chutneys- I had homemade salsa at home and dipped these into salsa. (Yes, I ended up eating a few of these, even though they're with rice.) They were really yummy.

What do you do when you have leftover rice? Do you have any great way to repurpose it? Have you ever had rotti before? Does this look like something you'd try? Which version do you think you'd try- my version, or the one in the video, following their instructions precisely?