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Sourdough naan recipe

russell's picture
russell

Sourdough naan recipe

I had a bit of a win tonight adapting a yeasted naan recipe to sourdough, so thought I'd share the recipe. Here's the original; see it for more details: https://www.mamtaskitchen.com/recipe_display.php?id=10108

450 g bread flour
200 g water
125 g natural yoghurt
100 g levain
10 g salt
75 g melted butter
1 tsp sugar

1. Make levain: 100% hydration using bread flour, 1.5-to-doubled

2. Warm your water and/or yoghurt to achieve a final dough temp you are used to for loaves. (I aim for 26C.)

3. In a transparent bowl, mix all ingredients but salt. Leave for 30 minutes (autolyse) in the environment you bulk ferment loaf dough in (I use my oven with the light on, door cracked, to maintain 24-28C.)

4. Add salt. Mix in with fingertips thoroughly.

5. Stretch & fold, rotate 90 degrees. Do this four times.

6. Repeat step 5 every 30 minutes for the first two hours.

7. Wait until you see some bubbles through the bowl walls and some rise. (For me, with my starter, at 26C, this was four hours after autolysing-I got somewhat less than the 30-50% rise I would have by this time with loaf dough but I pressed on as there were hungry mouths to feed.)

8. You are now ready to cook. See the link above for various options. The option I took was:

9. Preheat oven to 90C (190F). Place an earthenware or pyrex dish in there to hold your naan and cover with foil.

10. Heat a large cast iron skillet on high heat. Turn on your rangehood. Do not add oil.

11. Flour a work surface. Tear off a 2"-diameter ball of dough. Patting in the flour as necessary (my dough was sticky), roll into a ball, squash, then roll out as thin as possible. Aim for an oval or teardrop shape to emulate a tandoori naan.

12. Shaking off excess flour if possible, place dough in hot skillet. Wait for it to bubble up - approx 30-40 seconds. (Is it hot enough? It should be browning and/or scorching black by this time. Flip and cook for the same time again. With any luck the whole naan or large pockets of it will puff up.

13. During your 30 second cooking intervals, roll out the next naan. When a naan is done, put it on a plate. Put the next one in the pan. Put the one that's on the plate into the tray in the oven and recover loosely with foil.

14. Continue in this fashion until all your dough is gone. I didn't count but I'd say I made approx 10.

15. The recipe link above has various suggestions for how to jazz them up. I went with a quick brush with melted butter, done at the table. It seems very oily at first but it soaks in after a minute.

I didn't take a pic of the naans on their own but one of them is in the pic above.