I haven’t contributed a recipe in a while, so here’s something I make almost every day.
Fluffy, tasty naan
Naan so delicious you'll want to just eat it by itself
Servings: 3 people
Cost: $5
Equipment
- 1 Cast iron pan
Ingredients
Yogurt mixture
- 1/4 cup plain kefir yogurt
- 1 extra-large egg
- 1/4 cup ghee or melted butter
Yeast
- 2 tbsp honey
- 1/2 cup hot water (40-50C)
- 1 1/4 tsp yeast
Dry ingredients
- 3 cup all-purpose wheat flour
- 2 tsp table salt
Other ingredients
- 1 tsp Avocado oil
- 1 tbsp melted butter
Instructions
Blooming the yeast
- Add the 2tbsp of honey into a small bowl.2 tbsp honey
- Add the hot water to the honey and mix well to dissolve.1/2 cup hot water (40-50C)
- Sprinkle the yeast on top, and mix it into the honey solution.1 1/4 tsp yeast
- Let the mixture sit for 10 minutes while the yeast blooms. The yeast will rise to the top like foam.
Mix the other wet ingredients
- Pour the yogurt in a separate bowl.1/4 cup plain kefir yogurt
- Add the egg and mix together.1 extra-large egg
- If you added the yogurt and egg straight from the fridge, you will need to bring up the temperature of the mixture to room temperature. This will prevent the butter from re-hardening into clumps when you pour it in.
- Once your yogurt mixture is warm, pour in the melted ghee/butter and mix.1/4 cup ghee or melted butter
Prepare the dry ingredients
- Put your flour in a medium-large mixing bowl.3 cup all-purpose wheat flour
- Add the 2 tsp salt and mix well.2 tsp table salt
Mix the wet and dry ingredients
- Once your yeast has bloomed, pour its contents into the yogurt mixture and mix them well.
- Pour the wet ingredients into a little "well" in the flour mixture.
- Mix everything together. Use a spatula at first, but when all the liquid has been absorbed just knead the dough with your hands. You need to get the point where the dough ball is slightly moist to the touch without sticking to your hand. Add additional flour if needed.
- Put the avocado oil on top of the dough, just enough to make sure it stays moist. If it's very humid where you live you may not need to do that, but in my well-ventilated Montreal apartment in the winter it's needed. I use an avocado oil spray for this.
- Cover the dough and let it rise for 1 hour.
Divide the dough
- After the dough has risen, knead it lightly again to get the excess air out.
- Divide the dough into individual pieces. How many pieces is really up to you, I used to make 8 pieces but now I make 6 because I like my naan relatively thick and chewy.
- Cover and let sit for 10 minutes.
- Warm your cast-iron pan while the dough is resting. Contrary to what you may have heard, this is done at a fairly low temperature, on an electric range use 3/10. My range uses a weird system that goes from "low" to 7 so I use small element setting 2.
Stretch out and cook your naans
- For each of your little balls of dough, stretch and roll it out as large as your pan will accept. It's never going to turn out exactly round, but that's the beauty of naan.
- Put the naan in the pan and let it cook for 90 seconds.
- Flip the naan over and cook it for 1 minute. As a tip, I usually use that minute to roll out the next naan, it's pretty much perfect timing for doing this.
- Brush the melted butter on the top side of the naan and let it cool for a couple of minutes.
- Put your naans away into a container that doesn't let moisture escape. Your naans will be good for about a day, after that they tend to dry up and not be so good.
Notes
This is not a diet naan. I deliberately use butter because of the taste and texture. The original recipe called for vegetable oil which would be healthier but not as delicious. Any oil with a neutral taste should do the trick, I would recommend avocado oil if you're made of money. You may be tempted to use hemp oil figuring that its nutty taste will complement the bread taste, but I tried using it just to keep the dough moist and I found it distinctly unpleasant for reasons I don't quite understand.
I got the idea of using honey to bloom the yeast one night when I wanted to add a little sweet taste to the bread, and it worked so well I never bloomed the yeast with just sugar again. You will taste a difference between different honeys.
It's important to use fine salt in the flour, as opposed to coarse salt or kosher salt. Fine salt distributes evenly through the flour with mixing, but larger grained salt doesn't, and that makes naans that have weird salty spots.
