I wanted to make naan. I pored over the recipes in my cookbooks, the recipes given here at Fresh Loaf,  and decided that I did NOT want to make any straight-through naan. I have been making bread from a pre-ferment for so long that I have come to dislike the tasty of straight-through bread. It's too yeasty. Also, it costs more; yeast, even at my food co-op in bulk, can be expensive. I'm dirt-poor right now, and economizing. That's why the recipe from my Afghan cookbook appealed. It used a pre-ferment and didn't call for lots of expensive ingredients. 

The real Afghan naan is sourdough. They make it every day (send it out to the baker to bake in his tandoor) and just save a pinch of dough from today's bread to put in the pre-ferment for tomorrow's bread. I had let my sourdough culture die (bad mom!) but I could use a little yeast.

So I just made bread dough as if I were making the Fresh Loaf ciabatta (but without the dried milk, which I don't have). Pre-ferment of flour (mix of white and ww), yeast, and water, then added oil, salt, and a little more yeast the next day. Kneaded in KitchenAid. Let it rise once and then baked it in a cast-iron skillet on top of the stove. The pliable dough rolled out beautifully. (4-1/2 cups flour total made 12 naan just the right size for a skillet.)

I've never had tandoor naan, so I don't know what I'm missing ... but THIS naan was dang good. I froze most of it and I've been eating one or two a day. With a sprinkling of salt. Plus some homemade chai. Yum.

For the most part, I have had a lot of luck with bread recipes.  If it does not work out the way I want on the first try I begin the tweaking process.  It is not always fast but I get there in the end.  I say for the most part because I have had one bread nemesis.  One bread that, no matter how I tried, would never work out the way I wanted.  

That bread was the delicious Indian flat bread called naan.

Naan is my nemesis no longer.  Now I have a recipe for naan that is tender, chewy, crispy, and soft all at once, and is terrific stuffed with curry.  The recipe is adapted from one found here.  

Along with a good recipe I have a good cooking method.  Naan is made, traditionally, in a tandoor oven which produces an insane amount of heat.  If you want naan that has the right texture, the soft inside with the chewy exterior, you have to find a way to replicate a tandoor at home.  I tried the grill with average results.  I tried the stove, in a similar way that I cooked my tortillas, but it was not hot enough.  

I make pizza at home from time to time and have two very well seasoned pizza stones.  On the internet I had read that some bakers use their pizza stones, in a smoking hot oven, to achieve a tender interior with a crisp exterior.   It sounded promising, so I tried it.  I heated the oven to 500 F with my pizza stone on the lowest rack of the oven.  I let it heat for thirty minutes and then added one rolled out piece of naan.  It was as close as I will ever get to perfect, and it is pretty darn close!

Another thing I discovered is that you need to have patience.  Don't rush the naan.  Give the dough a two hour ferment, then after they dough is divided give it the full half hour proof on the bench before rolling.  Letting the dough develop will give you the taste and texture you want.

Naan   Yield 12 naan

3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp dry active yeast
1 1/2 cup milk, heated to 110F
1 tsp sugar
ghee to taste

Activate the yeast in the warm milk with the sugar added.

Combine the flour and salt.  Once the yeast is active, combine the yeast mixture with the flour mixture.  Mix in a stand mixer on medium speed for 5 minutes, or knead by hand until the dough is smooth and elastic.

Allow to rest for two hours, covered with a towel or plastic.

After the dough has rested turn it out onto a floured surface and divide into 12 equal pieces and round them into balls.  Cover with a towel and allow to rest for 30 minutes.

While the dough rests heat your oven to 500 F and place a pizza stone, or cast iron skillet, on the bottom rack of the oven.

Once fully rested roll out the dough until it is about 6″ to 7″ wide.  It should be fairly thin.

Moisten your hands with water, gently pass the dough between your hands to moisten gently, then lay on the hot pizza stone.  Close the oven and bake for 2 1/2 to 3 minutes, or until puffed and beginning to get brown spots.

Remove from the oven, brush lightly with ghee (or melted butter) and cover with a cloth.  You may need to press the naan to release the air inside.

Serve warm.

Posted at www.evilshenanigans.com - 2/27/2009

Naan

Spinach & Cheese

Thank you ejm! I was browsing your post on Palak Paneer and Naan and was inspired by your well documented process and delicious results. I have made Pita several times on the stone in the oven and they usually turn out well. I thought I would try the BBQ gas grill tonight. As you can see, they were a little thin in a few places but even the charred areas were tasty. My wife loved the spinach and cheese (firm tofu). The flavor of the cumin seeds was just subtle enough to be wonderful.

I will definitely make this again. Are there any egg plant mixes that go with Naan? I have had some canned egg plant from a middle eastern grocer that would be good on this.

I told my daughter about the Naan being the bread that fed people 5000 years ago. She thought I was cheating by not using a stone on an open fire.

No snickering on the burned spots now. This is my first time on the grill.

Eric

Lest anyone who reads my posts think I know what I'm doing, I've decided to post my latest adventure as an illustration to the contrary.

The story of how the tandoor got into my back yard is one for which the world is not prepared, but it is there, the weather is too hot to turn on the oven, and I thought to myself “Well, this is a good time to learn to make naan.”

The first step is getting the right tools.  After watching and watching the YouTube video of a chef making naan, I decided that the little tool seemed pretty handy.

Although it just looks like a wad of towels, it is actually a convex pad of compressed straw covered with a cloth.  It is firm enough so that (if you know what you are doing) you can get the naan dough to make good contact with the side of the tandoor.  It is pictured below:

Armed with the tool – the next step is to heat up the tandoor.  It took about two hours for my model (pictured below) to heat to the point where the walls were nearly 700F.

So it was time to cook the naan. 

I took about 4oz of dough and shaped it into thin disks and then draped them over the dough pad (sort of as per the video), gave them a quick spray of water (so they would stick better – hahahahahaha) and steeled myself to put my hand near a 700F tandoor entrance to stick the dough to the side.My first disk (of six)dropped promptly to the bottom to become a flaming dough ball.

Oh well.  I learned that you really need to apply some firm pressure on that tool.  Never mind the smell of burning feather as the hair was singed off my hand.

Finally disk three stuck.  But it also stuck to the side of the tandoor when it was done and came off in shreds.  Four was the turning point (or so I thought) and I moved on to five feeling like I had figured this thing out.  Four and five are featured in the pictures below.

Number six showed me to be overconfident and slid off the dough pad without ever making contact with the tandoor wall.

Well, two out of six isn’t bad – and what bread I did get was eaten with relish.  Of course, failure never deters me – it just makes me more determined.  I’ll be back with a report when the whole thing has been perfected. In about a year or so...

Meanwhile my consolation prize is pictured below.  It has been a long while since I had real Tandoori food…

Happy Baking!

Well, summer has come to the Rockies and the oven is being used only sparingly.

I thought that I might fire up the tandoor and make some naan.

I have made it before, but with mixed success (flaming dough at the bottom of the tandoor anyone?)

I'm wondering if the assembled wisdom of TFLers could help me.

Any advice?

Thanks in advance.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7y1mDJL-SE&

He makes it look so easy!

Interesting tool he's got for slapping it onto the wall of the tandoor. 

At some point not long after turning the oven on to preheat our bread stone, a fuse blew. We didn't notice until after putting the first two naan in the oven. Luckily for us though, we remembered that we had once made pita on the stovetop. So we quickly grabbed the tava (shallow pan in photo) and started heating it on the big burner.

So I followed this recipe

3c water

1t yeast

1t honey

1t salt

4T yougart

3/4c water

2T oil

I followed the recipe and baked it at 150c like it said. It tasted good, but it was like a pizza crust without the toppings. It was pale, compact, and chewy. Do you think the recipe was wrong by baking it at such a low temp? Should I try this recipe again but at 250c? Or should I ditch this one and try a different naan recipe?

I made Naan Flatbread and I made it with sourdoug