How to tell good chakki atta from bad.

Why chakki atta turns faster than fine atta

A wheat berry is three things stacked together: a large starchy endosperm, a thin oily germ at one end, and a bran coat wrapped around the lot. A chakki is a stone mill, and stones do not sort. They crush the whole berry at once, so the germ goes into the sack along with everything else, its oil smeared thin across every particle of flour.

That is the whole reason chakki atta tastes the way it does, and the whole reason it does not last. Oil sitting inside an intact germ is protected. Oil spread across an enormous surface of flour meets air constantly, and warm air fastest of all. Roller-milled fine atta has had the germ sifted out before packing, which is why a bag of it still smells of almost nothing weeks after a bag of chakki has gone sharp. Freshness is not a bonus feature of chakki atta. It is most of what you are buying.

The smell test, and what each wrong smell means

Open the bag, put your face close and take one proper breath rather than several small ones, because your nose stops registering a smell within seconds. Fresh atta is quiet: faintly sweet, faintly nutty, a little like a bakery before anything has gone in the oven. Every other smell is information.

If you only ever do one check, do this one. Colour can be adjusted by the miller and grind is arguable, but smell is the flour telling you plainly how old it is and how it has been kept.

• Sour or tangy, like the top of a bowl of dahi: the flour has taken up moisture and begun to ferment. It gets worse in the container, not better.
• Musty, like a cupboard shut through monsoon: damp storage. Sometimes it is the sack rather than the flour, but it passes into the flour.
• Crayon, putty or old paint: rancid germ oil. This is the classic chakki failure and it cannot be reversed.
• Bitter at the back of the tongue from a raw pinch: the same rancidity, further along. Raw atta should taste of very nearly nothing.

Colour, bran flecks and the chalni test

Whole-grain atta runs from creamy to light brown, and if you tip a spoonful into your palm and tilt it to the light you should see bran specks scattered through it in a range of sizes. Chalk white means most of the bran has gone. A dull grey cast, rather than a warm cream, usually means age or damp rather than a different wheat.

The more useful test at home needs a fine chalni. Sift two spoons of atta and look at what stays on the mesh. Stone-ground flour leaves a generous bran residue, and that bran is ragged and uneven, because the stones tore it. Roller-milled flour with bran folded back in leaves a thinner residue of flakes that are strikingly uniform in size, because they were sifted to a specification before being mixed back. Neither is a bad flour. But one of them is chakki and the other is being sold as chakki, and the mesh settles it.

Rub a pinch between thumb and forefinger while the chalni is out. Chakki should feel very slightly gritty. Talc-slick means a very fine grind, which is right for rumali roti and wrong for a thick winter roti, and is a fair sign you have picked up a refined grade by mistake.

What the dough tells you that the bag cannot

Some faults only show once the flour is wet. Fresh whole-grain atta is thirsty. It takes noticeably more water than a refined flour and keeps taking it through the first minute of kneading as the bran hydrates. If a dough you have made a hundred times suddenly comes together on less water than usual and then slackens in the bowl, the flour is old: the bran has already absorbed atmospheric moisture and has little capacity left.

Rested dough is the second tell. Cover it for twenty to thirty minutes and come back to it. Fresh atta dough darkens only a shade and smells sweeter than when you left it. Turning atta darkens more, greys at the surface, and smells sharper, because the warmth of your hands and the rest have released exactly the volatiles you were sniffing for in the sack. On the tawa, atta past its best puffs reluctantly, cracks at the edges as you roll, and stiffens within minutes of coming off the heat instead of staying soft under the cloth.

Buying so the bag is still good at the bottom

Most bad atta at home was decent atta at the shop. It simply outlived the household's appetite. The single most effective piece of quality control is buying a pack you will finish while it still smells sweet.

If you are choosing between grades rather than between bags, our atta buying guide walks through what separates chakki from whole wheat, fine and super fine, and which bread each grade is genuinely good at.

• Read the pack date, not only the best-before. Our atta pages carry a best-within window measured from the pack date, so the two together tell you where in its life the bag is.
• Size the pack to the season. We pack atta from one kilo up to fifty, and the household that sensibly takes a bulk sack in December should be buying small through May to September.
• Press the bag before you take it. Hard lumps mean it has already met damp air.
• Check the seams and the bottom fold for punctures. A pinhole is how both damp and insects get in.
• Warm atta came off the mill recently, which is a good sign — but let it cool before you seal it into a jar, or the trapped moisture condenses on the inside of the lid.