Text 14672, 94 rader
Skriven 2011-08-14 17:01:00 av JIM WELLER (1:123/140)
Ärende: Naan 1
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From Serious Eats, Kenji's latest Food Lab project...

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     Title: The Food Lab: How To (Sort Of) Make Naan At Home Pt 1
Categories: Indian, breads, info
  Servings: 4

           Naan

In many ways naan resembles really great Neapolitan pizza crust.
It's a soft dough cooked at extremely high temperatures. When it's
at its best, it should be puffy with a crackling thin, crisp crust
spotted with bits of smoky char that breaks open to reveal airy,
stretchy, slightly chewy bread underneath. Painted with melted
butter (perhaps flavored with a bit of garlic) and sprinkled with
good salt, it's so good on its own that sometimes I have to talk my
curry down from its fits of jealousy.

And very much like Neapolitan pizza, it's best when eaten fresh,
straight out of the oven. Unfortunately for us home cooks, the oven
naan is cooked in ain't exactly your run-of-the-mill hotpoint. Four
feet tall with walls two to three feet thick, weighing in at several
hundred pounds, a tandoor oven is the primary cooking vessel for
many traditional Indian and Pakistani dishes including naan.

Tandoor ovens are essentially just a well-insulated cylindrical
container made of brick, clay, or stone. To cook in it, you start by
building a large coal fire in the bottom. When properly preheated,
it achieves air temperatures of around 1,000 F or more. It's this
intense heat the causes naan to rapidly puff and char, just like
Neapolitan pizza in a wood burning stone oven.

To make the naan, the cook will stretch out a piece of yeasted flour
and yogurt-based dough into a rough disk shape, generally with one
end fatter than the other. The disk is draped over a moist ball of
towels, then the cook reaches into the oven and presses the dough
against the inner wall until it sticks. From there, the heat of the
oven does its work: air and water inside the dough rapidly expand,
causing it to puff out. In under a minute, the bread is baked and it
gets retrieved via a long metal skewer with a hook at the end (ever
notice how your naan has always got a hole in it? That's from the
hook).

Now listen. You could go out and buy yourself a tandoor oven (small
ones run about $200 or so), but here's a better suggestion: Just
grill it. It works so well for pizza, why shouldn't it do just as
well for naan?

The Dough

In fact, the only real key difference between pizza and naan lies in
the dough. While pizza dough is lean, that is, it's made of just
flour, yeast, salt, and water, naan dough is an enriched dough, that
is, it's got dairy in it. This affects its texture in a number of
key ways.

First, dairy, whether it's yogurt or milk (the two most common wet
ingredients in naan), contains fat, which impedes gluten development
in dough. Under normal, water-only circumstances, the proteins in
flour, which resemble tiny balls of yarn, will unravel and get
tangled up with each other, forming gluten, the protein matrix that
gives bread its structure and chew. Add a bit of milk fat to the mix
and the picture looks a little different. Fat will not only coat
flour proteins, making them less likely to get wet and unravel, but
it'll also physically get in the way of proteins cross-linking.

All this is to say that when you add dairy to your dough, you end up
with a much softer texture, essential for naan. Unlike a pizza crust,
which should have enough structure to stand out straight and stiff,
naan should be very easily flexible. Crisp, but not crackery.

I made several batches of dough using different combinations of
liquids ranging from 100 percent yogurt to 100 percent milk. Guess
what? None of them was bad. I preferred the slightly tangy flavor of
the 100 percent yogurt version, but there's no need to go out to the
store to get it, whole milk works just fine.

:Posted by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt

  From: Serious Eats                    
 
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Cheers

YK Jim


... BREAD IS MURDER! - The Save the Yeast Coalition

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