Lebanese Mountain Bread - How to Make Lebanese-Style Flatbread

[Music] hello this is Chef John from foodwishes.com with Lebanese Mountain bread that's right as promised I'm going to show you my take on what has become my favorite flatbread and possibly at least for the time being maybe my favorite bread oh and by the way if you happen to live on a mountain in Lebanon and at some point during this video you think to yourself hey that's not how we do it well I just wanted to quickly mention this is how they do it on the other Mountain so with that let's go ahead and get started with this very simple and sort of pizza-like dough and we'll Begin by dumping a portion of our bread flour into a bowl followed by a teaspoon of dry active yeast or is it active dry yeast I forget but same stuff and then we'll also toss in a little touch of sugar followed by some warm but not too hot water okay I usually shoot for about 105 degrees we should basically feel like warm bath water although that probably doesn't help much since I don't think people take baths anymore I mean who's got that kind of time especially considering all the hours we spend on social media but anyway what we'll do at this point is give that a mix to complete what some people in the business would call a sponge so what we'll do is mix that smooth and then we'll go ahead and cover it and let it sit for about a half hour to an hour or until it gets nice and bubbly and hopefully it looks a little something like this so that is looking good and we clearly have a very enthusiastic yeast Colony growing and then once that's been accomplished we'll go ahead and add the rest of the ingredients which will include a spoon of olive oil as well as a little bit of salt and then last but not least we'll dump in the rest of our flour and even though I'm using bread flour here I'm pretty sure this will work with all-purpose and then what we'll do once all that's together is grab a wooden spoon and we'll give this a mix and we will keep mixing until it all pulls together to form a relatively sticky dough ball although don't confuse sticky with wet okay towards the end of this step that dough ball should pull away from the bowl fairly cleanly and the texture should be somewhat similar to this so if yours does seem super wet and is still sort of smearing against the bowl you can add a little more flour but this is looking pretty good so at this point I'll go ahead and transfer that to a well-flowered surface to give it a little bit of a kneading and as usual we're using the bare minimum of flour just enough to keep it from sticking to our fingers or the work surface and what we'll do is work that dough for just about two minutes until we formed and stop me if you've heard this one before a very soft very Supple slightly elastic dough and really all that means is if we press on it it sort of Springs back so that is looking very nice if I do say so myself and once that's set what we'll do is transfer that into a bowl that we've drizzled in a few drops of olive oil and we'll kind of roll that dough around to coat it lightly and that is pretty much it for our dough production all we have left to do is cover this and leave it in some warm spot for about an hour to an hour and a half or until it doubles in size okay so the time is going to depend on how warm the spot is but this is what mine looked like about an hour and 15 minutes later and at this point what we'll do is transfer that to our work surface and give it another quick need to basically knock out all the air and then once we have our dough successfully degassed we have a couple options we could use this right away if we had to but I do not recommend it what I suggest is transferring this into some kind of zip top bag and place it in the fridge overnight before we use it and I know I probably should have told you before we started that you're not going to be able to eat this till tomorrow but trust me you're going to get a better product right not only are the flavors going to develop and it's going to be tastier but the texture is going to be better and the all-important stretching step is going to be easier so I did in fact leave mine overnight at which point it looks something like this so it might grow a little bit in the fridge but it's basically sort of going to look the same but regardless whether you use yours right away or leave it overnight like I did the next steps are going to be the same we're going to pinch off a portion of dough for me something slightly smaller than a golf ball and we'll go ahead and sort of rub and press that on the work surface to squeeze out all the air at which point we'll begin a two-step formation process and the first step would be to roll this out to about an eighth of an inch thick and again using just enough flour to keep it from sticking right the one thing that most bad Brads have in common too much flour so please be careful but having said that the dough is going to be sticky so you are going to need some and like I said we're going to roll that out to about an eighth of an inch thick which sounds kind of thin but not even close to how thin this needs to be which is why when it gets to this point we're going to stop and we'll give that a little stretch with our hands and then believe it or not we will lay that over the top of the bottom of a lightly floured mixing bowl and it's over this Dome surface where we're going to stretch this incredibly thin as in pretty much see-through so it might take you a few seconds to get it started but once you do just keep going around pulling it down until basically you've stretched it as thin as humanly possible without it tearing and by the way how this is done back in the old country is the dough is actually stretched over a round pillow which is then used to flop it on top of the grill they used to cook this but since you probably don't have a Lebanese Mountain bread dough pillow and mine's it the cleaners we'll go ahead and use this upside down Bowl which works quite nicely as you can see and I should mention if this looks a little too tricky or like too much fun and you just prefer to roll yours it will still work it just won't come out as thin or as good but anyway you decide you are after all the Sherlock Holmes of stretching Doe endomes but anyway what we'll do once our dough is stretched as thin as possible is very carefully with floured fingers transfer that into a very hot preheated dry cast iron skillet all right so we're definitely going high heat here and because of that and because it's dough so thin this is only going to take about 45 seconds to a minute per side and as that first side coach you're going to see lots of little bubbles forming which is exactly what we want to see and after about a minute we'll go ahead and flip that over oh and if you're wondering why I'm pushing down on it with a spatula I'm not sure you probably don't have to sometimes I just like to do things but anyway we'll give that side about a minute and that's it if your pan was hot enough you should see some beautiful brown marks on those blisters and then very important what we'll do as he's finished is pile them up on top of each other and then we'll keep those covered with either a towel or another plate and what's going to happen because of the residual heat those are going to kind of gently steam which is really the official final step of the cooking process right these would still be pretty good if you didn't do that but if you do they're going to retain more moisture and be even more Supple so I think that's one of the keys but anyway that's it my relatively simple method for simulating Lebanese Mountain bread and if you've never had this before you're in for a huge treat all right I guess it's sort of like pita bread but thinner tastier stretchier just better on every level and as far as I'm concerned just a vastly superior all-purpose flatbread which reminds me don't feel like you have to make some exotic Middle Eastern foodie with this I mean it's amazing with things as basic and simple as a BLT oh and one quick bonus tip here you definitely want to season your tomatoes with a little bit of salt and pepper since that really does make a huge difference but anyway let me go ahead and roll this up and right here I was trying to do the classic schwarma roll where we kind of fold in the bottom so everything doesn't run out as we eat it but I overstuffed it so it didn't work but I wasn't upset mostly because I remembered I was just about to eat a BLT on Lebanese Mountain bread which really was fantastic and I am not a big rap guy I never order a wrap because they're usually served on some kind of insipid flour tortilla well this my friends is roughly a thousand times better than that dry tasteless tortilla but anyway just an amazing flatbread delicious and fun to make the only slight downside to discovering this stuff is that now I'm significantly less impressed with our pita bread recipe sorry pita bread but we'll always have hummus anyway kidding aside I do find this stuff Superior to that on almost every level and I really do hope you give it a try soon so head over to foodwishes.com for all the ingredient amounts that are more info as usual and as always enjoy [Music]

Channel: Food Wishes

Views: 1,360,587

Keywords: Lebanese, Mountain, Bread, flatbread, pita, naan, chef, john, foodwishes, baking, doughs, syrian

Id: DfObqgc0TnQ

Length: 8min 19sec (499 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 11 2017