At the risk of repeating myself, I love Indian food. That mix of spices in the sauces just builds into this deep, savory experience, and let’s be honest, you don’t want to waste a single drop of it. That’s exactly where naan earns its place at the table. You tear off a piece, plunge it into the sauce, and wipe your plate clean without a hint of guilt.
I’m hungry just writing this.
You’ll need a baking steel or pizza stone for the best results, or a cast iron pan if that’s what you’ve got on hand.
(Experiment 119) Naan bread
Ingredients
- 1 tsp salt
- 2 cups flour I used Tipo 00 that doesn’t work well for pizza, else bread flour works
- 2 tbsp plain Indian yogurt best or plain yogurt
- 1 tsp sugar
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- 3.5 g active dry yeast
- 3/4 cup water ~85F
- Optional: melted butter salt, garlic butter, etc as a topic
Instructions
- In a stand mixer bowl, whisk the yeast, sugar, and water. Wait 10 mins
- Add the oil, salt, and yogurt to the mix and whisk
- Put the machine on low and start adding the flour slowly until it’s all mixed. The dough will be very wet.
- Cover with plastic film and let it rise for 1 (or ideally 2) hours at room temperature.
- After about 90 mins, you need to pre-heat your baking sheet. Put it in the oven at 500F
- Flour your work surface and dump the dough. Divide into four pieces and shape into balls. Again the dough will be sticky so add flour if needed to prevent from sticking too much. Just like pizza dough, you don’t want to manipulate the dough too much as you will push the air out of the dough. Let rest for 30-60 minutes
- It’s now time to stretch the dough.Once done, transfer either directly into baking steel or dump it on parchment paper then put on baking steel. If going direct it will be much more “burned”. To transfer in the oven, I recommend the use of a pizza peel
- Bake for 2 minutes then turn over for another 1-2 minutes.
- It’s ready to eat at this point, feel free to add whatever you like on top of it, I do like to put homemade garlic butter 😉
