My whole family loves naan bread. We love it with Mediterranean food, as pizza crust, or just with hummus. So yesterday, I thought I would try making it at home. I was probably a bit too ambitious and tried to double the recipe I used from Half Baked Harvest. Since the bread in this recipe is baked in a cast-iron skillet, I was in the kitchen for a while, standing at the stove. I also made quite a few mistakes during my preparation.
Click here for the Naan Recipe I used…
The dough before I mixed the yogurt/milk/yeast mixture into the flour mixture.
The first part was easy. Proof the yeast for 10 minutes, and mix up the flour and other dry ingredients.
This might be where I made my first mistake. I did not have Greek yogurt in the fridge, just plain yogurt, so that is what I used. Maybe I should have gone to the trouble of draining the plain yogurt to get the Greek-style texture.
The dough was very, very sticky! I don’t like working with sticky dough, so I added a little flour to make it more workable.
Maybe the moisture of the plain yogurt threw off the proportions of the rest of the ingredients.
My biggest mistake! Expecting these uncooked flatbreads NOT to stick together. I thought sprinkling each side with flour would keep them from melding together but it didn’t work.
Next time, I will definitely keep them all separated. I don’t think there is enough room in my kitchen to put 16 naan breads on a flat surface, so I will make a smaller batch.
Since my two little piles had collapsed together into a mass of dough, I just oiled my palms, pulled off a hunk of dough, and patted and stretched it using my hands into a rustic-shaped bread with an estimated 1/4 inch thickness. I think my estimate was a little off though. Then, into the skillet they went. After cooking the second side, I brushed the top with olive oil and sprinkled coarse salt over the bread.
The finished product! They are nowhere near perfect but at least, they got made!
My kids loved these! “They taste like pancakes with salt on them, Mommy!” Um… no, I don’t think they’re supposed to taste like pancakes… but I’m glad you like them anyway! Hence the name of this post: Homemade Non-Naan Bread.
What did we do with these? For dinner last night, we ate them with Korean BBQ (Bulgogi) and fresh lettuce from our garden to make a kind of Korean BBQ flatbread. The Korean BBQ was very easy. I might write up a separate post for that. For lunch today, I turned them into cheesebreads with Havarti and Provolone for lunch. Tonight for dinner, I made a pasta casserole and I used the naan left to make garlic naan. And now the naan is all gone. Boy, that was fast!
I think my next attempt at these I will bake them. It is much easier to bake 16 at once than 16 one at a time!
-Lynn
Note:this is the look I am aiming for. ? more work to be done!
