🇮🇳 India · Family: Kathi Roll · Region: Kolkata · Heat: Mixed · Bread: paratha · Proteins: chicken, mutton
Ingredients
The Mixed Kathi Roll is the Kolkata street wrap built around a combination of chicken and mutton rather than one or the other. The kathi roll is a flaky, layered paratha wrapped around skewer-cooked meat, and the mixed version is the maximalist order: two proteins with different textures and cooking behaviors folded into the same hot bread. The appeal is contrast in a single roll, the leaner shredded chicken against the deeper, chewier mutton, both sharing one spice profile and one sharp acid hit from the onions and lime.
The build has a strict sequence and small mistakes show fast. The paratha is the foundation: a maida dough laminated with fat, cooked on a flat griddle until it has crisp, separated layers and pliable spots. Many stalls finish it by cracking an egg onto the griddle and laying the paratha into it so one face is coated in a thin omelette. The chicken and mutton are cooked separately, since mutton needs longer, then combined and tossed on the hot surface with onion, chilli, and spice so they pick up char. The meats go down the center of the egg-coated bread, topped with raw onion, green chilli, a squeeze of lime, and often a chilli or mint sauce. It is rolled tight, the base wrapped in paper. Good execution gives a flaky, structurally sound wrap, meat that is hot and well seasoned, and a balance where neither protein is dry. Sloppy versions use reheated meat that has gone tough, a paratha that is either greasy and limp or cracker-hard, and so much sauce that the bottom dissolves before you finish.
Variations sit mostly in proportion and heat. Some cooks lean chicken-heavy because it is cheaper and faster; a good one keeps the mutton present enough to taste. Double egg, extra onion, and a hotter sauce are common upgrades. The egg-coated paratha technique that defines the format has its own deep history and deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here. The constant is the structure: layered fried bread, two charred meats, sharp aromatics, rolled to be eaten on the move.
More from this family
Other Kathi Roll sandwiches in India:
