Topic: Naan bread

[Mooelga]

This is the naan bread recipe that I use, which seems to give good results:

Makes around six quite big naans

Ingredients:

3 tsp yeast
3 tsp sugar
3 tbls warm water

600g plain flour/bread flour (I tend to use bread flour as it?s given me better results than plain flour)
6 tbls plain yoghurt
6 tbsp milk
3 tbsp vegetable oil
1 tsp salt
2 tsp baking powder

25g melted butter
Toping of your choice (garlic, coriander etc)

These are cooked at about 2000C under the grill (not in the oven)


Method:

Mix the yeast, sugar and warm water in a cup or small bowl, and leave to activate somewhere warm for about 5 minutes (it should look frothy once activated).

Mix together the flour, salt and baking powder in a big bowl.

Then stir in the oil, yoghurt, milk and the lastly the yeast.

Kneed together the dough for around 5 minutes until its nice and soft and pliable.

Cover the bowl in cling film and leave this to prove for around an hour somewhere nice and warm. If your proved dough is likely to swell to the top of the bowl, oil the cling film to stop it from sticking to the dough.

Once your dough has proved, divide the mixture into six balls for big naans (or smaller balls for smaller naans).

At this point I preheat the grill to about 2000C with a baking tray underneath the grill to get hot.

Knead your balls a little and then roll them out into naan shapes about 0.5 to 1.0cm thick.

Once they are to the desired shape and size, take the hot baking tray out,  put the naan bread on it and put it back underneath the grill. Depending on the size of the naan, you can probably cook one or two at a time.

Leave them under the grill for around five minutes, but keep checking them as you don?t want them to burn. They should start to puff up and go brown in places.  Once this has happened, take out the naan and add a topping of your choice and then brush on the melted butter.

For the topping on mine I used coriander, which was sprinkled on top and then brushed with melted butter. I have also done it with chopped garlic that works really well too.

Here?s a nice picture of what mine looked like:

[coolflow]

2000c,, off to the steelworks then..lol

[Tim.C]

Well I tried this 2 weeks ago. Partly because it doesn't use self-raising flour - which you can't get here in Austria.
Anyway, I used half-measures and all went swimmingly until I put them under the grill, where they puffed up and turned into almost ciabatta. The taste was good though not quite right.

Last weekend I tried again, this time using a little less baking powder and used about a 1/3 chappati flour instead of all white. Bunged a baking tray over the barbeque, and bob's your uncle.  A pretty damn close result at the second try.  Still a touch fluffy, but only a touch.
I think the kalonji have to go on pretty quickly while still hot.  And a bit of smoke really does the trick.
 I'll be trying this again.

[natterjak]

Surely the kalonji go into the dough mix? Not added on top of the cooked naans surely. Or did I misunderstand you Tim?

[joshallen2k]

Tim, its pretty easy to make your own self raising flour...

http://allrecipes.com/recipe/self-rising-flour/

Having little success with self raising flour naan recipes I started making my own to see if it wasn't my local brand here in Canada that was preventing me from getting good results.

I've since made my own SRF to make the H4ppychris naans.

They turned out well.

-- Josh

[Geezah]

Anyway, I used half-measures and all went swimmingly until I put them under the grill, where they puffed up and turned into almost ciabatta. The taste was good though not quite right.

After rolling out your dough, press firmly with your fingertips and make little indentations in the dough (30-40) as this helps keep the dough stuck together when its cooking and create smaller pockets of air rather than have the whole dough balloon.

[Tim.C]

I've done some googling on SR flour, but it all seems a bit hit and miss, so when I get time and could be bothered I'll try it...
I always baulk at recipes with a "cup" of flour (can't Americans use scales?  hah!    ). But I've made a spreadsheet to come up with an average of about 10 versions I found on the InterWeb that I'll start with when I try.

My first attempts at non-yeast naan recipes all turned out like biscuits. So I tried the yeast one and had more success. Only problem is that I don't always have yeast at home, and it needs that little more planning. I'd like to get at least a decent version without yeast for "emergencies".


@Geeza: thanks, I'll try that next time too.  They did tend to balloon up a bit.