🇮🇳 India · Family: Kathi Roll · Heat: Mixed · Bread: paratha · Proteins: mutton
Ingredients
The Mutton Seekh Roll is a minced mutton seekh kebab wrapped in paratha, the kebab-specific member of the roll family found across India. The angle is the seekh itself: a long, soft kebab of finely minced and well-spiced goat, shaped on a skewer and grilled, which gives the roll a uniform, tender, almost paste-fine bite rather than the chunky chew of whole-piece grilled meat. The flatbread is there to carry that smooth, smoky kebab and the sharp raw aromatics that go with it. It is built to order at a counter, paper-wrapped, and eaten warm in hand.
The build runs in order. Goat mince is worked with onion, ginger, garlic, green chili and a warm spice mix until it is smooth and sticky enough to cling, then molded along a skewer and grilled until the outside takes color and a little char while the inside stays soft and juicy. A coarse maida paratha is fried on a griddle until it puffs and layers; the kebab is slid off the skewer and laid along the bread's center, topped with sliced raw onion, green chili, a squeeze of lime and often a stripe of chutney or sauce, then the paratha is rolled tight and half-wrapped in paper. Good execution shows in a kebab that is moist and finely textured with a clean smoky edge, not dry, crumbly or gray; a paratha that is crisp-edged and flaky rather than doughy; and a roll packed evenly so each bite has kebab through it. Sloppy versions use an overcooked dry kebab that falls apart into grit, a limp underfried bread, or so much sauce that the smoke is buried and the wrap goes soggy.
Variation tracks the egg and the heat. A griddled egg layer fused to the paratha makes it richer and chewier; plain bread keeps the focus on the kebab. More raw onion, green chili and lime sharpen it; a milder build pulls the chili back. The fine, skewer-molded mince is exactly what separates the seekh roll from a whole-piece grilled-meat roll, where the texture is chunky instead of smooth, and from a dry-fried-mince roll, where there is no char. The closely related whole-piece grilled goat wrap on the same bread, the mutton kathi roll, deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here. What defines the seekh roll is that contrast of a smooth, smoky, tender kebab against flaky paratha and the bright raw onion and lime threaded through it.
More from this family
Other Kathi Roll sandwiches in India:
