Naan

With the lack of Indian restaurants in town (there is one Indian restaurant, which is decent, but we're trying to be frugal), we decided to try our hand at making some Indian food (we were also partially inspired by our newest copy of Cook's Illustrated, which we were given as a Christmas gift). Since we were going to try our hand at making some of our favorite entrees, we decided to also try our hand at making naan, a south-Asian flat bread.

Kimberly had a recipe in one of her old cookbooks, so we went with it. It was actually a pretty simple recipe - since it's a flat bread, it has no yeast and, therefore, doesn't need to rise. First, I combined the flour, salt, and baking powder, then added in the yogurt. Once it started thickening, I turned the mixture onto the board and kneaded until smooth and elastic. The recipe called for the dough to sit for an hour or more, but I'm not sure it needed that long.

I then cut the dough into small portions, which were flattened into about 6-8" roundish shapes. They were pretty thin, sometimes ripping and being see through. The dough was pretty sticky, so it wasn't easy to make perfect rounds, but rather, they came out slightly oval shaped, which was a fortunate mistake. Each was cooked on a pre-heated, dry cast iron skillet over medium heat. After a few minutes, the expected black/burn spots would start appearing, and the dough would start bubbling.

I took the naan off the heat before they finished cooking and set aside. After finishing the rest of the meal, I put them into a 500 oven and heated through, then slathered with butter - unfortunately, I took the first few out too early and they were still a little uncooked in the middle.

Overall, they came out pretty well. Crispy and black in some parts, chewy in the middle, nice tangy-ness from the yogurt, a good buttery creaminess. The recipe made 10 breads And we have half the recipe left to put in the freezer for future reheating.

Notes and Next Time

• Finishing the naan in the oven immediately after taking them off the skillet may have worked better. Then a quick reheat in the oven right before serving would have been perfect.
• I need to keep them in the oven longer to ensure that they cook through. I suppose I could have kept them in the skillet longer, which would have given them more color in addition to cooking through.
• In the skillet, the center of the naan was cooking/browning faster than the edges. Since we have a gas stove and the heat was set on medium, the flame was basically in the middle. It might be nice to have a flame diffuser (which would also help with the simmering of sauces and chili and the like).
  

Ingredients/Recipe

From The New Vegetarian Epicure:

• 4 cups AP Flour
• 1 t salt
• 1 t Baking Powder
• 2 c yogurt