The Parotta is the layered, flaky flatbread of Tamil Nadu and Kerala, made from maida and built specifically to come apart in soft, distinct sheets. It is a carrier bread before it is anything else: a tearable, pliable round whose job is to be ripped into strips and used to scoop and soak up gravy. The defining quality is lamination. The dough is worked until it can stretch thin, and that thinness folded back on itself is what produces the flaky, multi-sheet structure that separates a parotta from a flat, dense griddle bread.
The make is a sequence of stretch and fold. A soft maida dough is rested, then a portion is beaten and pulled out very thin, often whirled into a wide sheet, then either coiled into a spiral or pleated into ribbons so the thin layers stack. That coil is pressed into a round and cooked on a griddle with oil until the outside is gold and the layers set. Off the heat it is often clapped or crushed between the hands, the slap that loosens the sheets so they fan apart. Good execution shows in a bread that is crisp and gold outside while the inside pulls into many soft, separate layers, in enough oil to crisp and laminate without going greasy, and in a final clap that opens the structure rather than mashing it back into a slab. Sloppy versions show up as a dense doughy round with no layering, a hard dry surface from too little oil, or a heavy oil-soaked bread that flops instead of flaking.
It is served with kurma, salna, or a gravy, torn by hand and used to mop up the sauce, the soft layers soaking it without disintegrating. Variations move with the fat and the size, from a lean everyday round to a richer ghee version, and from a small thick one to a wide thin one. Rolled around a filling it becomes the wrap format, the parotta roll, which deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here, and its wheat-flatbread relative the paratha deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here. What makes a parotta a parotta is the lamination: a stretched dough folded into many thin sheets so the bread tears soft and carries gravy in its layers.