Taste & Create VIII – Naan

This month’s taste and create actually took me out of the country, to India!…Okay, so I didn’t actually go anywhere, but my partner this month has a blog called Cooking 4 All Seasons, and she makes lovely traditional Indian dishes.

It’s kinda exciting. I actually found a few recipes that I am tempted to try, but decided to go with Naan, a traditional Indian bread, and apparently one of my partner’s favorites. I only hope I’ve done it justice.

The recipe actually calls for cooking it in a tawa, which, from what I can figure out is much like a wok, only cast iron. Unfortunately I do not own a wok, or a tawa, so I just used a frying pan. So very American of me, right? It isn’t nearly as pretty as hers turned out, but it tastes damn good and it was actually lots of fun to try something like this.

She didn’t have exact amounts on some things, but thankfully all the bread I have been making recently gave me enough experience to make it work out.

Naan
Source: Cooking for All Seasons

3 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tsp instant yeast
1 1/2 cup warm milk (not above 100F)
1 tsp sugar
Sesame Seeds
Butter

Dissolve the yeast and sugar in the milk. Let rest approximately 10 minutes.

In a large bowl, mix well the flour with the yeast/milk mixture then mix in the salt. Knead until soft and elastic. Cover with a damp towel and leave in a dark place to rise until doubled, about two hours.

Remove the dough from the bowl, degas gently then divide into ten even balls.

Roll out into triangles, dusting lightly with flour as needed. I discovered that the thinner you roll out out the better.

Heat up a frying pan, generously brush one side of the dough with water, and begin to cook on medium heat, then brush the other side. Sprinkle with sesame seeds and as a triangle by dusting it with the flour. The dough should bubble a bit as it cooks, just leave it on the heat for a few minutes, then flip it to cook the other side for a shorter amount of time.

Move to a plate a generously butter. Enjoy.

My partner recommends having this with her Chicken Tikka Masala. If you try either of them, let me know how it turned out.

This recipe, especially the cooking part took a bit of trial and error since a frying pan is so not a tawa, but it was still a lot of fun. Can’t wait to see who I am paired with next month!