Naan bread

[antisoppist]

Recipe 2.

Aunty Harsha's Naan from Made in India Cooked in Britain: recipes from an Indian family kitchen by Meera Sodha

I usually make flatbreads using Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's flatbread recipe or vaguely making it up as I go along and cooking on a baking sheet under the grill. I wanted to try an authentic recipe and see what the difference was.

Ingredients
500g plain white flour
rapeseed oil
4 tbsp whole-milk yoghurt
1 pack of dried yeast (7g)
2 tsp sugar
2 tsp salt
1 level tsp baking powder
275ml whole milk, hand hot

Instructions
Put flour in large mixing bowl. Make a well in the middle and add 2 tbsp oil, yoghurt, yeast, sugar, salt and baking powder. Mix through with fingers until the ingredients resemble breadcrumbs, then add the warm milk little by little and mix until it comes into a dough.

Put the dough on a well-floured surface. Knead for around 5 minutes then scrape any off your hands using a spoon and settle the dough by rubbing a teaspoon of oil on it.

Transfer the dough to a bowl in which it can double in size. Cover it with a tea towel or clingfilm and leave in a warm place for at least an hour (my aunty leaves hers in the airing cupboard).

When the dough has doubled in size, divide it into 12 pieces. Take one piece, roll it into a ball and flatten it between your palms. Coat it in fresh flour and roll out to around 12cm by 20cm.

Put a frying pan on a medium to high heat and when it's hot, place the naan in it. When the naan starts to bubble (after 20 to 30 seconds) flip it over using a spatula and cook the other side for the same amount of time, checking regularly to ensure it doesn't burn. Flip over again and quickly press it all over with a chapatti press or spatula for 10 to 15 seconds. If it rises at this point, it's a bonus and means your naans will be soft in the middle. Turn over again for another 10 to 15 seconds, check that there are no uncooked doughy bits, then take off the stove.

Keep warm by stacking them on top of each other on a plate or wrapping them in foil.

Variations
None. I made 12 for 3 of us (!) and heated the remaining ones the next day chopped in half in the toaster.

Verdict
The best breads I have ever made, apparently. This is going to become my default naan bread recipe.

Can we have a tag for breads? I could use baked goods but they're not baked.

Comments

BREAD OF GLORY

[minoanmiss]

*copies down*

Re: BREAD OF GLORY

[antisoppist]

When I kind of make it up as I go along, sometimes they turn out like fluffy flatbreads and other times they turn out like pitta breads. Both are nice and I eat them but I have never known quite what makes the difference. It is good to have a new default.

[monksandbones]

Well, this sounds amazing! I think I'm going to have to try it myself!

[antisoppist]

I make pancakes and scotch pancakes but I'd never tried bread in a frying pan before and it was much easier than I'd thought.

[valoise]

The only flat bread I've made are pitas, but I think I'll give naan a try now

[siberian_skys]

It sounds so good. I'm bookmarking to try down the road.

[hudebnik]

Many years ago I redacted a recipe called "muqawwara", from a 13th-century Arabo-Andalusian cookbook, that is an eggy, yeast-raised bread cooked in a frying pan. But it's not intended to be a flat bread like naan or pita: it's a thick enough disk that, after frying on both sides, you can cut out the middle on a diagonal, leaving the bottom intact. Then you crumble the removed part, mix it with chopped nuts, put the crumb-nut mixture back into the cavity, and drizzle with honey and melted butter. I think "muqawwara" is an Arabic word for an arena or amphitheater, which it resembles before you put the crumbs back in.

Ah, yes: here's the article I wrote in about 1990 (for an SCA publication, so it's in forsooth-speak).