We sure do seem to go through a lot of flat breads in this house. Sometimes, it’s to go with Middle Eastern food, sometimes Indian or Sri Lankan, sometimes Mexican. I have a few different types of flat breads I make, depending on what else I’m making, and this is one of my favourites.

The curd (you can use yoghurt) and oil makes this into a very soft naan with an understated taste.

Here you can see the naan with Greek eggplant dip, hummous, beet & feta cheese pizza, and blackened grill seer fish.

It’s easy to make and, better yet, tastes better than anything you could ever buy.

Wild Yeast Naan

Ingredients

• 130 grams (1/2 cup) sourdough starter (100% hydration)
• 50 grams (1/4 cup) oil
• 110 grams (1/2 cup) yoghurt or curd
• 220 grams ( 2 1/4 cups) flour
• 8 grams (2 teaspoons) sugar
• 5 grams (1 teaspoon) salt
• 4 grams (1 teaspoon) baking soda

Directions

1. Mix the wet ingredients. Mix the dry ingredients. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and mix.
2. Let the dough rest for 15-30 minutes for the flour to absorb the liquid (autolyse).
3. At this point, you can do the knead bread thing for 5 minutes or until it’s smooth and elastic, or you can be lazy like me and knead it for 10 strokes, let it rest 15 minutes, knead for 10 strokes, let it rest 15 minutes, and so on for a total of 4 kneads. It’ll still pass the window pane test and I won’t kill my joints.
4. Let it rise to double in volume (for my starter, that’s usually 2-4 hours).
5. Divide into 6 equal-sized pieces and form into balls. Let rest 20 minutes.
6. Roll out into circles (or, if you’re like me, vague amoeba-like shapes) about 6 or 7″ in diameter.
7. Dry-fry until golden brown, then flip and fry the other side until it’s also golden brown. At medium, that’s around 30-45 seconds per side. You can also bake them.

If you want to make the naan with commercial yeast instead of wild yeast (sourdough), you can.

Naan

Ingredients

• 50 grams (1/4 cup) oil
• 110 grams (1/2 cup) yoghurt or curd
• 65 grams (1/4 cup) water
• 285 grams (2 7/8 cups) flour
• 4 grams (1/3 packet or 1/2 teaspoon) instant dry yeast
• 8 grams (2 teaspoons) sugar
• 5 grams (1 teaspoon) salt
• 4 grams (1 teaspoon) baking soda

Directions

1. Follow directions as for the wild yeast naan. Add the yeast to the dry ingredients.

You can also fry them in oil, but it’s unnecessary. There’s enough flour on the naan from rolling them out that they don’t stick, even when I use el cheapo aluminum lids (two, one stacked on top of the other, to reduce burn points from the flame) because that’s all I had to work with at that time. And also because I usually make a double or triple batch of these with two burners going – when I get into a good rhythm, I can even do three burners, but two is easier and less stress.

As I mentioned above, I use curd–water buffalo curd, to be more specific. Water buffalo curd is a cultured dairy product similar in taste and texture to yoghurt and is higher in fat than full-fat yoghurt since water buffalo milk is higher in fat than cows milk. If you’re using a yoghurt, especially if it’s low-fat, then you may have to increase the flour needed to around 300 grams, possibly more.

These can easily be frozen. I do this frequently, and I then warm it up in the microwave and it’s just as good as the day I made them.

I’ve also used this dough – the equivalent of two balls for naan – for a 10″ pizza crust. Turned out very nice indeed.

If you give this a try, please let me know how it works for you.

This post originally appeared on the Cooking Manager blog as a guest post back in early February of this year, Cooking Manager is run by Hannah Katsman whom I first met over on Twitter. Cooking Manager has a lot of good, useful information, so check it out!

I’m not a long-time sourdough baker – I’ve only been baking sourdough (wild yeast) bread for the last couple of years. Since I don’t digest commercial-yeasted bread well, I use sourdough exclusively, which also means trial and error in converting recipes to sourdough.

One of my first breads was a sweet bread that I regularly made for breakfast. Problem was, while it tasted great, it didn’t consistently rise, even after 12 hours. Plus, even on occasions when it rose, it looked butt ugly. What was going wrong?

Turns out I was using too much sourdough starter in my bread recipe. After much research, I learned that a good amount of sourdough starter is about 10 to 20% of the flour weight in fermented flour.

Since I know that’s going to be confusing, let me use an example with easy math. I like easy math.

Let’s say you use this recipe to make bread:

• 1000 grams flour (about 10 cups, depending on how you measure flour)
• 650 grams water (2 3/4 cups)
• 20 grams salt (4 teaspoons)
• 2 packages dry yeast

And let’s say your sourdough starter is 100% hydration (that is, a 1:1 ratio of flour to water by weight), then, with a 20% fermented flour target in mind, I would use this:

• 800 grams flour (1000-200, since I want 20% or 200 grams of the flour to be fermented in the sourdough starter)
• 450 grams water (650-200 because the starter is equal amounts of water and flour)
• 400 grams sourdough starter (200 grams flour + 200 grams water)
• 20 grams salt

You can use less sourdough starter than 10% fermented flour for sure. It’ll take longer to rise, which is a benefit to some people, like if you want the bread to be more sour. But in most cases, I wouldn’t use more than 20%. I say most because I do have a recipe or two where I do exceed the 20% by quite a bit, but those are the exception, not the rule.

What happened to my butt ugly sweet bread when I reduced the fermented flour amount from about 26% fermented flour down to around 12% fermented flour? Ugly old lady butt dimples disappeared, and instead, I had smooth, lovely bread. And it rose! Consistently! Every single time!

And my husband sang to me, “Baby butt, baby butt, baby butt buns, oh gimme my baby butt, baby butt, baby butt buns…” But he’s a little crazy.

I’m sure the question “Why 20%?” must be occurring to someone. I asked it, too.

If you use too much sourdough starter in the bread, then there isn’t enough food from the fresh flour for the wild yeast to feed on. With insufficient food to feed on, the bread doesn’t rise since live yeast produces carbon dioxide as a biproduct, and what’s what gives bread its air holes.

As well, fermented flour has gluten that’s been overdeveloped (gluten develops naturally when flour becomes wet), which isn’t a problem when the fermented flour is used at low amounts, but when a lot of fermented flour is used, it can’t support the dough properly, hence the ugly dimples and inability to rise.

I think "life is an experiment" is a phrase I take way too seriously.

I needed a recipe for buns – I’d been craving a Subway meatball sub, and since the nearest Subway is in India, I figured the only way I was going to get a meatball sub would be to make my own.

I have no idea why I opted on a kaiser bun recipe, except that a kaiser bun has a similar texture, crumb, and hole that I was looking for in a bun, so I figured, hey, why not? Like I said, I think I take "life is an experiment’ way to seriously.

The recipe was already in grams and already converted to wild yeast. All that was left for me to do was halve it and, well, make it.

Oh, yeah. In case you’re wondering about my sanity, Fahim’s the one who comes up with the crazy titles. Kaiser Soze Rolls is his creation.

Kaiser Soze Rolls

Makes 6 monster buns or 8 hamburger-sized buns

Ingredients

• 140 grams (1/2 cup) sourdough starter
• 125 grams (1/2 cup) water
• 1 egg (large, about 50 grams)
• 13 grams (1 tablespoon) olive oil
• 26 grams (1 tablespoon + 2 teaspoons) sugar
• 335 grams (2 3/4 cups) flour
• 7 grams (1 teaspoon) salt

Method:

1. Mix the ingredients until they come together, then let sit for 20-30 minutes (autolyse). You can then do stretch and folds or knead for 5 minutes, cover the dough and allow it to rest for 5 minutes, and then knead for another 5 minutes.
2. Once the stretch and fold has been completed, or once the dough has doubled in size, divide the dough into 12 more or less equal sized pieces.
3. Roll the dough into balls as if you were forming little boules.
4. As you form the rolls, set them aside and cover them so they won’t dry out and let the dough relax about 20 minutes. While the dough is relaxing, put a sheet of parchment paper onto a baking sheet. Once the dough has relaxed, form into rolls or buns or whatever is the shape of the day.
5. Pre-heat your oven to 425 F (220 Celsius). I strongly suggest steaming the oven as you put the rolls into the oven. Just before baking the rolls, flip them over so they are cut side up. Bake for 15 minutes, turning the rolls half way through the bake. Immediately put the rolls on a cooling rack. You want a crisp and nicely browned crust. More than half of bread’s taste is in the crust, and it is developed by browning – don’t shortchange yourself on the flavor you can get out of the roll by underbaking it.

Fahim doesn’t like honey, and to him, the taste and smell of the honey in this bread is noticeable, so I subbed it out with water and sugar. Didn’t do that the first two times I made the bread, so I’m listing an untried-but-close-enough-that-I-feel-comfortable-posting-it variation on the recipe.

The first time I made this, I formed the dough into hoagie-type buns for sub sandwiches. I was, unfortunately, in a time crunch to get them done in time for a specific meal, so they didn’t rise as much as they should have, and given that my oven is still broken (that’ll be still broken until it dies enough to buy a new one), I didn’t get enough oven spring to compensate.

I served them as meatball subs with my pickled Nai Miris (cobra peppers – hottest in the world) on top. Yum!

The second time, I shaped these into round buns of roughly the same size, but not entirely, so I had a couple that were entirely a lot bigger than the others. All told, though, they were all bigger than hamburger buns. The two biggest were quite the monsters, in fact. Tasted good, nice and fluffy (I let them rise for the proper amount of volume increase this time), but huge.

This recipe is supposed to be for six 3 1/2 ounce Kaiser Rolls, which is also a great size for hamburger buns. Except, no. They’re much bigger than that.

The second time I made these, I made an oven-baked barbequed chicken, onion, & bell pepper dish that I served as sandwich filling. Oh yeah, baby!

Tags: wild yeast, sourdough, kaiser rolls, buns, hoagie rolls, bread

On the Bread Bakers Apprentice Challenge Twitter stream, there was a discussion about ciabatta breads and how the one in Peter Reinhart’s book wasn’t very wet, which also meant it couldn’t achieve the truly large holes that most people look for in ciabatta bread.

@misterrios said:

@LMAshton @gaaarp The one I normally make is the Jason’s Cocodrillo from TFL: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/2984/jasons-quick-coccodrillo-ciabatta-bread which is 95% hydraation.

My response?

@misterrios Wow! I’ve seen ciabatta recipes as high as 80%, but 95%? It’s almost crazy, yet the pictures! Gotta give this a sourdough try.

So I’m giving Jason’s Quick Coccodrillo Ciabatta Bread a try. It’s already in grams – yahoooooo! – but I need to convert it to sourdough. Or wild yeast. Which is the same as sourdough, just a different name. And I halved it because – well, because there’s just me and Fahim and I gotta be realistic about the amount of bread that could possibly be consumed in this household.

And what’s the Coccodrillo bit about? No idea, other than it being French for crocodile. No matter – I’m making it anyway.

Jason’s Quick Coccodrillo Ciabatta Bread

Variaton 1

• 50 grams wild yeast starter (100% hydration)
• 250 grams flour
• 212.5 grams  water
• 7.5 grams salt

Directions

1. Mix all ingredients together (food processor or mixer if you have it) until roughly combined. Let the dough rest for 20 minutes (autolyse).
2. Still in the mixer/food processor, beat the heck out of the batter. It’ll feel like pancake batter to start with, but in anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes of beating the heck out of it, it’ll form itself into a very sticky dough. If it starts climbing too soon, switch to the hook. (Mine took 5 minute sessions x 3 sessions for it to form in my cwappy little food processor.)
3. You’ll know it’s done when it separates from the side of the bowl and starts to climb up your hook/paddle and just coming off the bottom of the bowl. It will definitely pass the windowpane test.
4. Place into a well oiled container and let it triple. (And he ain’t kidding about the triple part.)
5. Empty on to a floured counter (scrape if you must, however you gotta get the gloop out), cut into 3 or 4 pieces. Spray with oil and dust with lots o’ flour. Let them proof for about 45 minutes, which gives you enough time to crank that oven up to 500F.
6. After 45 minutes or so, the loaves should be puffy and wobbly. Stretch into your final ciabatta shape (~10" oblong rectangle) and flip them upside down (this redistributes the bubbles, so you get even bubbles throughout), then transfer onto parchment or a heavily floured peel. Try to do it in one motion and be gentle. It might look like you’ve ruined them completely, but the oven spring is immense on these things.
7. Bake at 260C/500F until they are 96C/205F in the center (about 15-20 minutes), rotating 180 degrees half way through. Some people like to turn the oven down to 232C/450F after 10 minutes.

Please note: I used my cheapo cwappo sucky food processor and it worked just fine. Not broken yet or anything. Which is really unfortunate – I keep trying.

In the cheapo cwappo sucky food processor, I had to take breaks every five minutes to not burn out the motor. Yeah, I know, trying to break it, but still, I gotta be realistic, too, right? So I beat the dough for 5 minutes, took a break for 2 minutes, beat the dough for 5 minutes, took a break for two minutes, and then beat it for a final 5 minutes. At that point, the dough was visibly formed and climbing the, uh, centre thingie. Definitely formed. Defintely coming off the bottom. Definitely off the sides and clinging into a center mass vaguely resembling an amoeba-like ball.

And yeah, it had no problem passing the windowpane test.

The tripling part, for my wild yeast dough, took about 3 1/2 hours. And it was definitely triple! And very, very fluffy and bubbly!

I didn’t empty mine onto a floured surface. Instead, I emptied mine into a glass cake pan, 9×13", that was lightly greased. I didn’t want to add more flour to it, especially flour that might not be completely absorbed into the dough and would leave flour streaks in the bread. Turns out that it worked perfectly fine.

And, since I halved the recipe, I left it in one piece rather than cutting it. I could have cut it and had two narrow flat loaves instead of one huge flat loaf. Meh. Either way is fine, really.

For shaping the loaves, I dumped it onto a floured cookie sheet. Next time, I’ll use a lightly oiled cookie sheet instead. I’m not a fan of the raw-flour-on-the-outside-of-the-loaf look. And, really, oiled surfaces work fine, too. It may be less traditional, but it works better for me.

The result? This bread turned out exactly as advertised. Oh yeah, baby!

I should mention that I don’t get as much oven spring with this bread as other people do – my oven is broken, it doesn’t reach over 425F, blah blah blah. Still, we like it fine.

I’m also submitting this post to Yeastspotting. Yeastspotting is a weekly showcase of truly drool-worthy breads. In addition to this being part of Sourdough Saturday here on my blog.

Tags: ciabatta bread, high hydration dough. bread, wild yeast, sourdough

One of the adventurous aspects of using sourdough as leaven instead of monoculture commercial yeast is that sourdough takes a bit longer to rise. And, to make matters slightly more complicated, how long it takes to rise can vary considerably.

When it’s cool, cool for me being, say, 28C/82F, it takes longer for the bread to rise than when it’s warm, warm being, say, 35C/95F. Yeah, see, only our bedroom has air conditioning – electricity is expensive here, so having air conditioning in the rest of the house would bankrupt us. So room temperature in the kitchen tends to be on the warmish side.

Point being that rise times for bread can range from 1 1/2 hours when it’ warm to 12 hours on a day when it’ cool. Of course, I tend to wonder, on the longer rise times, if it’s because I’ve screwed something up.

Anyway, the last few days, the bread dough after twelve hours had barely doubled, so I wasn’t expecting to find a mutant dough blob when I got up this morning. Yet that’s exactly what I got.

I’d put the sourdough cinnamon buns in the oven to rise – oven off, of course – and upon opening it, found blobs of dough on the floor of the oven with more dough blobs falling down the sides of the pan the rest of the dough was in. Uh…

So naturally, I hurriedly put the oven on to bake after cleaning up the dough at the bottom. And when it was done, this was what I got…

My glorious, glorious mutant cinnamon buns.

Pizza here generally means either Pizza Hut or Dominoes Pizza, both US chains that have infiltrated Sri Lanka. They offer pizza at probably about 2/3 the price it would cost in the US or Canada, but the quality… Well, let’s just say that, for someone who’s had really good pizza, it leaves something to be desired.

I’ll also add that Pizza Hut and Dominoes pizza in Canada is excellent compared to the schlock we get here.

For example, we’ve had pizzas that had perhaps three pieces of chicken for the entire pizza. Or six pieces of onion. We’ve had completely flavourless pizza – no seasoning of any kind. And when they say “chicken sausage”, they really mean chicken wieners. Wieners.

Does anyone here think wieners on a pizza is a good substitute for sausage? Anyone?

At times, we’ve had pretty passable pizza – not excellent, just passable. Never have I had excellent or even very good pizza here.

So. What does a girl do? She makes her own, naturally.

And since any good pizza starts with pizza dough, here’s my experimentation with sourdough pizza dough. Sourdough because I don’t use commercial monocultured yeast.

Sourdough Pizza Dough

Ingredients

• 390 grams (1 1/2 cups) sourdough starter (100% hydration)
• 15 grams (1 tablespoon) olive oil
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 150 grams (1 1/2 cups) flour
• 1 tablespoon dried rosemary

Directions

1. Mix sourdough starter with olive oil, rosemary, and salt, then mix in flour until you have a soft dough..
2. Knead about 10 minutes until dough is smooth and elastic.
3. Cover and let rise until doubled in volume, about 1 1/2 to 3 hours.
4. Shape into pizza crust either by rolling out or by using your fingers to manipulate the dough. I use pans with 1+” walls, so I put about 3 tablespoons olive oil into each pan first and then spread with my fingers.
5. Let rise another 1 1/2 to 2 hours.
6. Top with sauce, toppings, and cheese, and bake until done, about 15 minutes on my broken oven’s highest setting, which is probably about 450F/230C.

The original instructions (I’m no longer sure where I got the original from – if you recognize it, please let me know where you’ve seen it so I can link to it) said to divide this into three balls for the crusts for three 10-12″ pizzas. I found that the dough was too thin for my tastes, and since my pans are 12″ in diameter, I tried using the entire amount for one pizza. It resulted in a fairly thick, substantial crust, probably close to a deep dish pizza – I haven’t had or seen one, so I’m guessing on equivalencies.

By dividing this in half, it would likely give a regular-thickness crust for two 8-10″ pizzas.

When I make two pizzas for two meals for us (lunch and dinner later), I double the dough and use half for each. Works out great. Added bonus: both Fahim and I seem to like the thicker, more substantial crust. Still, I’m thinking of experimenting with dough quantities to see how much would be required for a typically-thick 12″ pizza. Just for analness sake.

The rosemary… Ah, the rosemary. That adds a subtle flavour that works with the rest of the pizza flavours so very well. It takes the pizza crust from ordinary and pretty good to Oh yeah, baby!

I like Oh yeah, baby!