Garlic naan in a cast iron skillet — tawa-style (no yeast, no oven)

it is absolutely possible to do restaurant quality garlic naan at home without a tan door in a pan on the stove any stove we're not even going to use the oven i'm not going to lie i had quite a few hilarious fails before i got this method down but i mean the results speak for themselves first dough a fascinating thing about indian style breads is the diversity of leaveners used this right here is probably the original one curd yogurt crucially yogurt containing live active bacterial cultures you mix this into some flour and in time they will puff it up a bit then we got the dried yeast and then finally chemical leaveners baking soda and baking powder here's the book from which i first started learning about indian cooking over 20 years ago and her non recipe calls for all the leaveners all three kinds it's like millennia of baking history all piled up in one place and for years i've baked this recipe by simply cooking the naan under the broiler on a pizza stone and that gets you a very tasty little flatbread but it is not the non that i know and love from indian restaurants that is i've had much better luck getting that effect with a no yeast dough two cups of all-purpose flour like 250 grams that's enough for four loaves a teaspoon of sugar enhances browning i might just do half a teaspoon of salt you could want more but i prefer to top mine on with some more salt at the end a teaspoon of baking powder double acting baking powder i think that helps the texture and then just a scant quarter teaspoon of baking soda to neutralize the yogurt that's coming after a couple of tablespoons of any oil you want i'm using olive oil about a quarter cup of yogurt 60 grams or so then just enough milk or water to bring this together i started with half a cup like 100 mils and then i ended up kneading in maybe 50 more most western dough recipes including my own generally tell you to start with an overly wet dough and to keep kneading in flour until the texture is right every indian dough recipe i've seen does the opposite they start dry and then knead in liquid and the right texture for this is nice and soft but just barely sticky it's drier than pizza dough it should be just a little sticky and the gluten is developed enough when it kind of bounces back at you like that i'll oil this to keep it from drying out and it's a quick bread you could cook it right now it would taste okay but you wouldn't get very many bubbles i've found that you need to let it sit for at least a half hour under a wet towel but it gets better with time leave it for many hours if you can okay now let me show you a version with yeast almost the same as before a couple of cups of flour a teaspoon of sugar half teaspoon of salt teaspoon of dry yeast to bloom it if you want to be safe and a little baking powder too half a teaspoon most non-recipes with yeast seem to call for some baking powder as well i don't fully understand how they interact but there's a few great threads about that topic on pizzamaking.com i've linked those in the description a couple of tablespoons of olive oil and this is important just a little yogurt like a tablespoon too much yogurt and yeast together and it becomes a cake not a bread i think it's all the acidity weakening the gluten structure a little more milk or water this time because we have less moisture from the yogurt i think i did a cup total until i got the right texture remember smooth soft but only slightly sticky like any yeast bread this has to rise for at least an hour at room temperature here's the no yeast version after a couple of hours and to my surprise it has puffed up a bit i'm not sure the extent to which that's the chemical leavening or the live bacteria in the yogurt but lots of indian no yeast naan recipes tell you to leave it for many hours in a warm place i think they're depending on those bacteria in the curd if you don't need this a little bit more shortly before you cook it the naan tends to blow up one huge bubble my goal is three or four smaller bubbles hence the last minute kneading and there's our four dough balls ready to bake i really admire folks who could manage this much effort to make a side dish for a typical weeknight meal i can't this is a special occasion thing for me and on a given week night i'm much more likely to cook with the sponsor of this video hellofresh america's number one meal kit one thing i love about this is the seasonality you'll note that this week's recipes are sweater weather suitable there's meal plans for everyone locale family friendly veggie there's everything you need in the bag to get dinner on the table in less time than it takes to go to the store they have these stock concentrates they give tons of slow roasted flavor to quick dishes for example and speaking of dishes these simple six step instructions use cleanup minimizing strategies like roasting the green beans on the same tray as the meatloaves the plans are flexible you can pause the deliveries whenever you need to you can ask for extra protein some garlic bread whatevs hello fresh gives a lot of meals to charity by the way and they're stepping that up this year with the whole global pandemic thing go to hellofresh.com and use my code 80 adam ragusia to get a total of 80 off across 5 boxes including free shipping on your first box 80 bucks off with my link and code in the description thank you hellofresh okay let's bake our no yeast naan some people roll this out with flour i've found that it's a lot easier to just let it stick to my counter the sticking helps it keeps the dough steady and stops it from immediately snapping back the way you keep it from sticking to the rolling pin is to simply roll outward and off outward and off that's instead of rolling it back and forth if you did it back and forth it would stick i think the perfect thickness is just slightly less than the thinnest you could possibly roll it now garlic small differences can be very big in a simple food in this case i'm talking about how you cut the garlic i grated this garlic which i gather is one of the traditional methods here chopped garlic gives you pebbly pieces that tend to fall out of the bread thin stringy pieces from a grater or from a garlic press seem to adhere a lot better crushing it with salt would give you a similar effect as well thin stringy pieces that stick well to the dough a little fresh chopped cilantro as well this is like pizza you can top it with whatever you want be more creative than me but one thing that i really like is this traditional method of rolling the toppings into the dough this really embeds them makes them part of the bread while still maintaining some heterogeneity last step right before you cook it is to wet the bottom side a little bit this dissolves the surface starch and creates a sticky layer of literal paste that you would use to make this stick to the inside wall of a tan door which is a vertical oven in our case we want it to stick to a cast iron skillet on medium heat every stove is different i've found that medium or a little less than medium is the right temperature on my stove but that took experimentation to find out to do this method an indian cook might use a flat round griddle pan called a tawa it's a pan with no sides i found that my cast iron skillet works pretty well too stainless steel has not done as well for me but maybe you could make it work this method depends on the dough sticking to the pan so we can't un-stick it to check the bottom we just have to guess when it's cooked and that took me a lot of practice after just a minute or two you should see some bubbles blowing up i am not sure the extent to which those bubbles are from the double-acting baking powder reacting at high heat to make carbon dioxide or if they are simply steam from inside or underneath the dough i suspect it's mostly steam since lots of recipes don't use baking powder at all only baking soda to react with the acid and the yogurt that reaction happened instantaneously two hours ago so i think this is mostly steam inflating bubbles that were initially created by the chemical leaveners though my experiments indicate that the double acting baking powder also helps to aerate the texture a bit after a couple of minutes you should see the edges starting to look dry and cooked i've also had good success using my nose to tell when the bottom is done basically at the first tiny whiff of a burned smell it's time to cook the top for standard tawa naan you would invert the pan and then cook it over the open flame of a gas stove but i found that it works just as well with a cast iron skillet and just as well on my electric resistance coil stove i just jack the heat all the way to high and rest the upside down pan right over the burner the only kind of stove this wouldn't work on is an induction stove because induction doesn't heat the air i'll give the induction folks an option later i want to see some smoke coming out my goal is to get some singeing on the bubbles while the rest of the surface should still look almost raw that is key to the restaurant style nan that i'm familiar with parts of the surface should still be quite doughy that is done and if you're thinking it doesn't look like naan yet that's because you're missing the final ingredient a generous brushing of melted butter at the end i'm using salted butter to complement the slightly under seasoned dough the final remaining challenge is to unstick the bread from the pan it'd be a lot easier to scrape this out of a tawa which has no sides to get in your way and yeah this one is going to stick on me you know what i realized i baked like 59 in a weekend to prep for this video and i'd really messed up the seasoning coat on my cast iron so i did a very quick re-seasoning clean pan on high a little spray of oil wipe it thin let it burn until it stops smoking once i had an okay seasoning layer again my non started sticking when i wanted it to stick and releasing when i wanted it to release ironically the starch paste glue on the bottom tended to not stick well enough when i tried this in a stainless steel pan my non just fell out much better results in the cast iron a little too much color on that one but nice this tawa style naan is amazing at replicating the effect of a tandoor if we simply cooked it in a pan in oil it would taste like fried bread but this tastes baked because the bottom cooked on that little layer of starch paste instead of fat and the top simply cooked in very hot dry air that gets you crispy bubbles and a baked flavor you could maybe replicate that effect by transferring the pan under a very hot broiler to brown the top but you know it doesn't work blasting it with a kitchen torch i thought that might work but all it did was burn the garlic now for some reason the no yeast dough seems to work better for tawa style naan most recipes for tawanon that i've seen call for no yeast i'll show you what the yeast dough does with this method i'll knead it again after a couple hours of rising divide it into balls and then proof them for a little bit at least 15 minutes to get a second release of gas oh by the way you have to give the pan a very quick wash and dry after each non that you cook a lot of residue from the previous naan could interfere with the sticking process back to my yeast dough i'll roll one out and top it as before wet the bottom to make it sticky on the pan it goes and for me the yeast dough just tends to puff up evenly lots of tiny little bubbles all the way through i'm not getting any giant bubbles that will go crisp when i invert the pan and brown the top i've also found that for some reason the yeast dough doesn't stick quite as securely yeah well anyways brush that with butter perfect color on the bottom there i would say the flavor of this one is superior because yeast fermentation is delicious but the texture is inferior it's like a western dinner roll it doesn't have those crisp filo-esque bubbly layers maybe it takes the intense heat of a tandoor to get that from a yeast dough with the tawa style method i would absolutely do the no yeast dough again now what if you have an induction stove or what if you're simply too scared to do the whole pan inversion move well you absolutely can cook the bread until it's done on the bottom and then just flip it just brown the other side a little bit a little bit more than that but not too much more i think a key to any naan is letting the surface remain a little doughy that looks okay the texture's not as good as if we'd cooked the top with hot air but it still tastes like naan because we cooked it without oil it tastes baked and not fried so if you're feeling brave give this tawa style method a shot again it really took me a lot of practice and i've hardly mastered it but the results are pretty extraordinary

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 2,036,060

Rating: 4.9168968 out of 5

Keywords: naan, garlic naan, homemade naan, tawa naan, cast iron naan, baking powder, yeast, baking soda, naan bread, naan recipe, recipe

Id: zogvMiPpQrs

Length: 11min 15sec (675 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 01 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/2Liberal4You]

Weird that he doesn't mention 1M. Recorded before then?

[u/Jake_Jeremy]

I'm wondering - if you need hot air to get a good top side, wouldn't putting the pan under a hot broiler work?

[u/whereareyougoing123]

I have to say, as someone who is pretty critical of Adam sometimes this is one of his best videos. He clearly put in a ton of effort and I love the fact that he gave us a few different recipes and told us about the strengths and weaknesses of each.

[u/autofill34]

I always flip my naan, it also allows me to cook more than one at a time. But of course this way is going to give you a more authentic experience. There's no way I'm cleaning it after each one! That's why it seems like only a special occasion thing. (I also use non stick.)

I proof the dough ball, separate it into individual balls/portions and freeze them on a cookie sheet in the freezer. Then gather them and toss them in a freezer bag. They thaw on the counter in 30min or... 30 seconds at a time, on low in the microwave, checking in between. They don't puff up as well after freezing but you'd be surprised! It's a good alternative so it doesn't become such a hassle for weekday cooking.

When you make an Indian dish it's complicated enough, sometimes I don't have the energy to make fresh naan each time. Freezing it allows me to make Indian food once a week.

I love the tikka masala recipe, and make it all the time. (Warning about the kashmiri powder it is way more spicy than I thought it would be!) It's awesome with naan, glad Adam did a video on it. I'm going to adjust my recipe and add some more leavening.

By the way I did chef John's naan recipe and it did not include yogurt or milk and it was much more bland than the naan with yogurt. I was surprised but it really makes a big difference.

[u/NocturnalWiji]

I don't know if Youtube is better than here to ask this (over 1000 comments) but:

What about using a non-stick pan instead to do this? Since it's on medium/slightly below medium, heat wise, should be okay?

[u/opossum23]

Let me be clear: I think cultural appropriation is a real problem, and that's why I don't do any 'ethnic' recipes in my videos. I think it's important to uplift marginalized peoples and amplify marginalized voices, and let THEM tell their stories and share their culture through their food.

[u/Dickson_Butts]

Does anyone think that "flipping upside down" method would work on an electric stove with the metal coils? I'm worried that would be too much direct heat and would just burn it

[u/Mako_sato_ftw]

who's nan? (sorry i had to put a blackpanthaa reference here)