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Cooking without a safety net

Thursday, September 26, 2013

All or Naan

I still haven't gotten the hang of Indian food, but I will occasionally fake something similar (lately, using a jar I picked up at a food fair back in Oregon and only recently opened).  I use this as an excuse to do something I know I can do: make passable naan.

My recipe comes from the excellent and well-illustrated Bread.  I've only made it a couple times, but it works well with dinner (obviously), and I usually end up eating pieces for breakfast or lunch for the next couple days.

I'm having naan of it.
2 t dry yeast
1 C milk
4 C all-purpose flour
1 1/2 t salt
1 t sugar
3 T plain yogurt (I think I actually used vanilla flavored yogurt once--that's good, too)
2 T ghee or unsalted butter, melted (I can't find ghee and haven't yet learned how to make it, so I used butter)


  1. Sprinkle yeast in 1/2 C milk.  Let stand 5 minutes, stir to dissolve.  In a large bowl, combine flour ans salt, then make a well in the center.  Add the melted butter, dissolved yeast, sugar, and yogurt.
  2. Mix in the flour from the sides of the well.  Add remaining milk as needed to get a stiff, slightly sticky dough.  (the book says "stiff, sticky" dough.  I have trouble managing dough that is genuinely sticky, and I suspect you do, too.  You're not going for chewing gum stuck to your shoe consistency here; you just want it to feel a little tacky as you handle it.  You should be able to easily free your hand from the dough ball after picking it up)
  3. Knead ten minutes.
  4. Let rise until doubled.  It may take 3-4 hours.  Plan accordingly.
  5. Punch down, let rest for ten minutes.
  6. I diverge from the book again here.  It says to divide the dough into four pieces, then roll them to 1/4 thick and about 6 inches in diameter.  The math doesn't work.  I can get them to achieve one of those dimensions, not both.  So I divide it into 8 pieces, roll them to the specified thickness, and if they are still a little big in diameter, that's ok.  Make naan of manageable size.
  7. Preheat your broiler on the highest setting (mine only has one setting, so that was easy).  Another side note here: If you have an electric oven, the broiler is probably at the top.  If you have a gas oven, the broiler is definitely at the bottom.  This has caused me trouble in the past, but it works fine for the naan.  Just move your oven rack to the bottom.  If you're using an electric oven, move the rack to the top, but maybe not all the way to the top.  These will puff up A LOT, and you don't want to burn the tops of them.  Much.
  8. Preheat the baking sheet for 2-3 minutes.  Put a couple dough rounds on the sheet (I can usually fit three of my smaller rounds on my sheets.  It should be easy to gauge, because while they will expand upward--sometimes an awful lot--they don't expand outward) and bake 2-3 minutes on each side, until puffy and golden.
  9. Stack baked breads on top of each other on a wire rack.  Cover with a clean, dry cloth to prevent drying.  Eat that night if possible.  Otherwise, they toast well, but the smooth outer texture makes spreading stuff like cream cheese nearly impossible.  Jelly might work.

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