Homemade Naan? Sure, You Can!

This past visit to D’s Professor’s house, we brought cake — but knowing that Professor himself was cooking a vegetable curry for us, we brought freshly baked naan.

Naan is one of those things that’s either addictive and habit-forming, or it makes you sick. Store-bought naan… makes us sick. Cushy soft, oily white bread might taste good, but pretty soon, our bodies complain about the oil content and the preservatives. Naan from a South Asian restaurant generally digests just fine… the problem there is that you could eat your body weight in the stuff, if someone is willing to bring it hot to your table.

We knew we were flirting with disaster making our own — it really is very good — but what’s curry night without naan? And it’s ridiculously easy, too.

A Basic Naan
modified from Bake My Day

• 4 C white whole wheat bread flour, plus extra for dusting
• 1-1/2 tsp salt
• 1 Tbsp olive oil, plus extra for frying
• instant or dry yeast – about 1-3/4 tsp active dry yeast
• 2 cups water
• 1 teaspoon caraway seeds plus 1 tsp. cumin seeds, whole

1. First, mix the flour, salt, oil, yeast, and water into a bowl and mix together for 5 minutes to allow the yeast to act. Tip out onto a lightly floured counter and knead for 5 minutes, or until the dough is soft and pliable. Let rise for a half hour.
2. On a plastic covered cutting board or a Silpat, divide your dough into eight even pieces, then leave to rest for 1 hour.
3. At the end of the hour, place the dough on a lightly floured counter and, with a rolling pin, roll out each piece into a rough circle. Your dough should be about a half inch thick. The original recipe suggests letting the dough rest again, but we’ll be honest — we didn’t. We were working under a deadline!
4. We used a stainless steel skillet, spritzed it with olive oil, and flopped a single rolled out piece of dough on it, over medium flame. As we watched, the dough bubbled, and after about a minute, we flipped it over to bake on the other side. The first naan was very golden-brown, but seemed unnecessarily greasy. Since the dough contains oil, we simply used a dry pan and bake/fried the bread, watched it bubble, turned it with our fingertips (it doesn’t stick) and watched them stack up!

We like our naan pretty thin, and while we enjoy it plain, it’s easy enough to add chunks of garlic or onions, raisins and curry powder, or any of a number of other treats that make it habit forming and hard to stop eating. One thing we know for sure, though: no more store-bought naan. It’s just not EVER going to be as good as what we make ourselves.