Naan

Naan! It is so good. I still haven’t been to India, but the best naan I’ve had was in the Indian neighborhoods of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Now I’ll be making a delicious version here at home, thanks to my Rustic Bread Class at the Culinary School of the Rockies.

As you can see from all of my naan balls, this recipe makes a lot of naan. I just froze whatever I wasn’t eating and plan to re-heat it at 250 on a pizza stone. Easy.

Ingredients:

25 oz. all purpose flour
2 1/4 tsp active dry yeast
1 TB sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 TB Kala Jeera seeds
8 oz. warm milk (100-115 degrees)
3 oz ghee, melted
7.5 oz plain yogurt
1 egg
extra ghee

First of all, you might need to get yourself over to Savory Spice Shop to buy some Kala Jeera seeds. Mail order them if you need to. Savory Spice Shop has everything!

Start by mixing the warm milk and yeast in a bowl and let it sit and foam for 10 minutes or so.

In another bowl, mix the flour, baking powder, salt, sugar, melted ghee, egg, yogurt, and kala jeera seeds. Then, add the yeast mixture into this and knead (in your KitchenAid mixer) into a pliable dough that isn’t too sticky. Let this stand and double in size.

I refrigerated mine over night because that is what we did in class. I let it come back to room temperature the next day, divided it up, and rolled it into golfball sized dough balls. Cover the dough balls with a damp towel and get your oven HOT! 500 degrees hot! Make sure you have your pizza stone on the bottom rack and remove other racks to give you room to maneuver.

Roll out the dough balls on a lightly floured surface to approximately 1/8 inch thick.

I like to make an assembly line- as 2 or 3 are baking on the stone, I’m rolling out another 2 or 3 for the next batch. After a few minutes on one side, they’ll start to poof out. Flip them and wait another couple minutes for them to be perfectly done.