Homemade Naan, It's Easy and Fun

A popular Indian flat bread, Naan is traditionally baked in a clay Tandoor oven, but with a pizza stone you too can make authentic delicious naan.

Adapted from a recipe from Manjula's Kitchen, the dough is simple to make and the timing is flexible. You can set the dough to rise in the morning and bake when you get home from work. Or you can let it rise over night and bake any time the next day. If you can't get to it right away, punch the dough down and put it in the fridge. When you're ready, bring it back to room temperature before shaping and baking.

Naan Recipe:
2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 teaspoon active dry yeast
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
Pinch of baking soda
2 tablespoons oil
2 1/2 tablespoons plain yogurt
3/4 cup lukewarm water
1 cup all purpose flour for rolling

1 TBS melted butter
Fleur de Sel (Kosher salt can be substituted)
Fresh cracked black pepper

Dissolve yeast in warm water and let "bloom" for 15 minutes.

Put flour, salt, sugar and baking soda in the bowl of a standing mixer and, using the dough hook, mix on low until combined. Add yogurt, oil and yeast mixture then knead on medium, for about 5 to 10 minutes. Add small amounts of flour if too wet, until a very soft ball of dough forms. Turn out onto floured board and knead lightly by hand, adding flour to the board to keep the soft dough from sticking.

Put dough back into the same bowl used for mixing and let rise, at room temperature, at least 2 hours or until it doubles in bulk.

When ready to bake, preheat oven, with pizza stone in the lower quarter of the oven, to 500 degrees. Punch down the dough using oiled hands and, on a well floured board, knead lightly and divide into six equal balls.

Roll balls out into a rectangle about 1/4" thick, using plenty of flour to prevent dough from sticking.

Gently place two or three naans directly on baking stone and bake 5 to 7 minutes, watch closely as they can burn quickly. When puffy with brown spots all over, they're ready and should be placed on a cooling rack. While still warm, brush lightly with melted butter, sprinkle with Fleur de Sel and fresh cracked pepper. Proceed with the rest of the batch. Makes 6 Naans

We love Naan with Indian curries and chutneys but it's equally at home with kabobs or even aged cheddar cheese. We eat it with everything but our absolute favorite is all by itself, fresh and still warm from the oven. There's nothing like it. Should there be any left overs, they toast up perfectly in the toaster oven, much like the sourdough waffles. I can see how this could be habit forming.

Tip:
My naans are never of uniform size or shape but don't sweat that part, they bake up perfectly every time, always delicious and they disappear quickly.

Here's a video from Manjula's Kitchen that I found helpful.

Zucchini Bread for Knitting Foodies

Spring is definitely in the air...

and while I wait for the last snow to melt, I'm on a mission to use up everything I put up last summer and fall. We have been eating from the freezer all winter long and now it's looking quite bare. What I do still have is a few bags of shredded zucchini. Frozen in three cup portions, the exact amount called for in the zucchini bread recipe I've been wanting to try. This was originally a recipe for banana bread and a favorite of Christine's, a fellow knitter. Christine would often show up for our weekly knitting with her moist and not too sweet banana bread, which she serves with whipped cream cheese.

This week, I made my zucchini version for the knitters. Usually we all bring food to share but don't coordinate our efforts so every week is a surprise. Sometimes we all show up with crackers and cheese, sometimes we end up with lots of desserts. Last Tuesday, though, the stars and the moon were aligned and we had tremendous food....

Laura's Spinach, Beet and Goat Cheese Salad with Caramelized Walnuts

Lynne's Everything Quiche and Emily's Bacon and Mushroom

Christine's baguette with goat cheese and fig preserves

Ellen's red cabbage and carrot coleslaw

My Zucchini Bread

Sue's Lazy Daisy cake and a parade of other goodies...

...but Karl prefers my homemade waffles with new 2009 vintage maple syrup

Among all that fancy food, my zucchini bread may seem quite ordinary, but don't be fooled, it's yummy, gorgeous and versatile. It's just right with afternoon tea, excellent for dessert and whether its my zucchini bread or Christine's banana version, we all pounce on it whenever it makes an appearance on knitting night. And best of all, it's so easy to make and handy to have around.

One Bowl Zucchini Bread
2 cups flour (I use King Arthur Flour's unbleached all purpose flour)
1 cup brown sugar
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup oil
4 eggs
3 cups shredded zucchini
1/2 cup chopped walnut
2 tsp vanilla

Preheat oven to 350 F. Oil two loaf pans. Combine the dry ingredients in a bowl. Mix well with your fingers breaking up the lumps of brown sugar. With a wooden spoon, blend in the remaining ingredients in the order given. Beat the batter for 1 or 2 minutes. Bake about 45 minutes, until a tooth pick inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool before slicing. Makes two loaves.

No-Knead Sourdough Bread

When I needed to get out of town last summer, we headed out to the Cape to stay with our friends, Bob and Jeanne. Bob has been baking bread for as long as I’ve known him, and I've known him a very long time, so he knows what he's doing and his sourdough loaves are a thing of beauty. When he offered me some of his starter, though, a red flag went up in my head. If you’ve ever had experience with sourdough, you know what I mean. It’s like coming home with a pet that must be fed and tended to and I wasn't sure I was up to the task. But Bob made bread making look so simple and effortless that I threw caution to the wind and accepted his gift.

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Bob's boule, the object of my envy

The sourdough sat in its one quart Ball jar in the back of my refrigerator. Every couple of weeks I'd pull it out, scoop out a cup to use in one recipe or another, then feed it. I would add 3/4 cup of flour and 3/4 cup of water to the jar, mix it all together and leave it on the kitchen counter until it comes alive and starts to bubble, usually a couple of hours. Then I'd put it back in the refrigerator to hang out for another couple of weeks.

This went on for several months as I baked decent loaves of bread and made wonderful waffles for breakfast. Bob's beautiful crust and crumb eluded me, however, until I discovered the no-knead method of bread making made famous by Jim Lahey a few years back. I’ve adapted Jim's recipe to use sourdough instead of yeast, and the result is perfection itself. The process is insanely simple, with a bowl and a wooden spoon the dough comes together in two minutes flat, no fussy measuring, no kneading, with only a spoon to wash.

The loaves come out of the oven rustic and gorgeous every single time. Cut through the crispy, thin crust, and the inside is holey, light and chewy. I’ve made more than a dozen loaves over the last few weeks. I can’t seem to stop making it and my kitchen smells like a French bakery. So to those of you who’ve adopted my sourdough, you must make this bread, and to everyone else out there, get your hands on some sourdough, even if you have to beg or steal or, better yet, make your own starter. DO IT! It will make you happy.

Recipe for No-Knead Bread

In a large bowl, mix together

2 - 3 cups all purpose flour

1 cup sourdough

1 cup water

3/4 TBS kosher salt

The dough should come together in a shaggy ball, sticky and wet. I let it rise in the same bowl that I mixed it in, mine came with a plastic lid that I put loosely over the top but a damp kitchen towel will also work. Let sit on the counter from 8 to 12 hours. I've left it for as long as 24. This is a very forgiving dough, I usually mix it up sometime during the day and leave it over night then shape and bake any time the next day.

Here's what the dough looks like after 12 hours or so.

Transfer onto a generously floured board, being careful not break the bubbles, gently shape into a ball. and let sit while oven is preheating. Put a heavy 5-quart dutch oven with its lid, side by side, in the oven, preheat to 500F. Any large, heavy pot will do, I've used Le Creuset and All Clad, both work very well.

When the oven is at 500F gently place the very soft dough into the pot. Don't worry about how it lands or how it looks, it'll still come out perfectly baked. Cover and bake 20 minute.

After 20 minutes, a pale crust forms.

Remove lid and continue baking another 20 to 30 minutes until deep golden and internal temperature between 200 and 210 degrees F.

Remove to a cooling rack and listen for the crackling sound the crust makes as it cools.

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Fresh Garlic Soup

A wintry mix

I found inspiration in my basket of garlic

Garlic is so easy to grow, it's a mystery to me why it's not more widely grown. Here in south western New Hampshire, I plant garlic the last week of October, just before the ground freezes. I save the biggest cloves from the summer's harvest for planting. I plant them four inches apart, one inch deep, in a raised bed filled with good garden soil, rich with compost. Cover the entire bed with three inches of hay, then I sit back and wait for spring. That's it! In spring, as soon as the ground thaws, the garlic starts growing without any help from me.

Garlic bed in early spring

They're ready to be picked when four bottom leaves turn yellow and start to brown. To harvest, I gently pull them out of the ground, brush off the extra soil and hang them in the garage to cure for winter storage.

I grow more than a hundred heads of garlic every year to share with friends and to make this fabulous soup. Plant some garlic next fall and you'll never look back.

Fresh Garlic Soup

I came up with this recipe a few years back when a bumper crop of fresh garlic sent me scurrying for ways to use garlic. This soup is quick and easy, comes together in an instant. Don't be afraid of the amount of garlic, it'll come out creamy, mellow and delicious. Like chicken soup, it's a cure for any winter colds. Enjoy it piping hot by the fire and you can almost ignore the wintry weather outside. Here's the recipe:

2 heads of garlic
4 cups of water
2 onions, finely chopped
1/2 cup olive oil
6 sage leaves
4 cups chicken stock
salt and pepper

Separate the garlic into cloves, leave unpeeled. In a soup pot, bring 4 cups of water to a boil, add garlic cloves and boil 8 minutes. Drain and peel the garlic cloves. Return them to the pot and add the rest of the ingredients. Boil gently uncovered, until garlic is meltingly soft, about ten minutes. Remove sage leaves and puree soup in a blender or food processor. Salt and pepper to taste. Served with warm crusty bread and salad, it makes a light comforting supper for two.

This is my first entry to Weekend Herb Blogging, hosted this week by
Chriesi of Almond Corner.