Would you share your recipe? I may have made naan before, but it's been a long, long time.

Teresa

Here they are before baked and when they were done. They were yummmmmy...

Carolyn, thank you for posting this. I've been wanting to try naan for some time.

I am finding Naan in my local market - it is wonderful as a quick pizza as a side or bread with soup or stew. Different & one of my new favorite items to keep on hand.
Carolyn, yours look delicious.

Thanks Mag... We live pretty far out in the wilds, so the stores here don't have such a thing...and I would have to drive about 70 miles to buy Naan bread... but it is simple enough to make and really inexpensive too..

Your naan looks great. Good idea to use it for pizza dough.

The only thing missing from a home baked version of Naan is that wonderful flavour imparted by a clay Tandoori oven. You just can't duplicate that in the home. Unfortunately.

Ann

What if they were baked on a pizza stone in a hot (regular gas) oven?

Teresa

You can do that Teresa. I've baked them on a hot pizza stone. Even then though you don't get that amazing tandoori flavour.

Ann

Actually I am quite satisfied with the way the ones I made turned out. We have eaten in Indian Restaurants, and I like mine just a much... I have a dear friend that is Indian, and she does her on a griddle too. And they are excellent..

We went to an Ethiopian restaurant in New York some time ago. They served Naan as your eating utensil. Lovely taste and quite the experience! I've not thought about making Naan and trying to duplicate that wonderful taste. Thanks for bringing this up. I may try this after all the guest are gone and things get back to typical/normal for us.

Karen, there is a wonderful little Ethiopian restaurant in Victoria that Matthew introduced me to a few years ago. They serve injera a flatbread, to use as the utensil. Almost like a spongy pancake.

Nice to see you posting again. How about some pictures of your grandbabies?

Ann

Injera! That's it! I've been calling it Naan all these years and somehow I knew better.

I so wish that we had an Ethiopian restaurant somewhere around here. Mathew is quite the scout!

I need to round up a few photo's of the Grand's and post over in Conversations :-) They are getting so big so fast! News Flash! We are expecting another Grand in May!

ok back to our regularly scheduled program :-)

I love Naan bread and I use it as a pizza base sometimes too. Or just brush with olive oil, some minced garlic and shredded mozza or gouda and melt. Serve with a nice cream soup, yum!

There seems to be a naan craze just now. I'm seeing it everywhere. I agree that it is very good bread. There are a number of other Indian breads, all of which are delicious IMO -- roti (chapati), poori, paratha and others. Also, there are several variations of each depending on the grain used or the filing in the case of paratha. Watching YouTube videos is a good way to learn how to make them.

Jim

Just when I promised myself to take a cooking break.....up comes Naan..... you are all wicked enablers.

It's not very practical to buy a tandoor. The temperatures are brutal and not for the faint hearted!

I like yogurt naan and use a recipe like this one.

https://www.indianhealthyrecipes.com/naan/

I, too, use a yougurt based dough. Eggs and sugar are more of a hallmark of western baking.

They bake up lovely in my iron skillet on top of the stove. Most flatbreads will puff up on a hot skillet, even tortillas.

It takes a village, literally. Like many other old bread traditions, the bread is made by bakers in a community and not everyone has their own ovens at home. Rather, it is purchased from vendors who keep the ovens going.

it takes lot to heat up a clay oven. It is not something that is as causual as heating up to bake a cake. I have read that, in some communal settings, that there would be a communal oven fired up and all would bring their bread to bake it in the oven. They would prepare their own bread at home and bring it to the common oven.

My husbands Italian grandmother used to do this, in her New Jersey Italian community. They lived in tiny apartments and having an oven for bread was not something that everyone had at home. Just as she had learned to do growing up in Italy, she id the same when she immigrated. She took her risen bread to the baker to bake for her, right there in Hoboken.

Many still dont have the facilities to bake. That is what bakers are for. Sure that much of that has changed in our modern world .

Too bad that we dont have good bread bakeries here in the US. If you do have a local bread baker, count yourself as among the lucky. They are far and few between, for sure.

Naan was brought to the east by the Persians and the word is derived from the language of Persia.

Given its origins, it is no wonder that it is a bread traditionally made with cultured products, and is a very basic old world bread using grains and oils. Ingredients such as sugar and eggs are not typical of that part of the world, the middle east. and the grain was likely to be some whole grain of some manner and not white flour. Not that you cant bake a rich egg bread in the same manner as you would a naan. But, old world flatbreads are a different kind of thing from the Western influenced breads and tend to be real basic.

Reviewing a host of recipies for naan does give some that call for egg and a bit of sugar. Things do change, but it was originally a basic bread with grain and some oil and could also be used to serve and eat with, like a tortilla or pita bread.

i bought some of that naan from Costco once, on a whim, and I did not iike it. It was sweet! Sweet has come to dominate much of what we buy, so I am not surprised. If it suits your taste, do it. It is your darned dinner and it matters to no one else but you. Not my preference, but it is not my dinner.

In much of Europe bread is baked in loafs and not as quick baking flat breads like this. Especailly northern Europe, it is likely that one might have a warm hearth and some type of enclosed oven of some sort to bake the loaf, even a Dutch oven. But, in hot and sparse climates there is less need for heat and you are more likely to be baking something small on a hot rock of some manner.

I also make a pita bread in the skillet. Pita and naan are very much alike, just different incarnations of grain, something to leaven it with, and some oil to dress it and something good to wrap it around or dunk it in. I have even baked potato bread as a flatbread in a skillet.

Yougurt or buttermilk gives a nice texture and taste to bread, even that baked in a loaf.

Lars, I saw your pizza oven video. Did you ever get it not burn up your pizza?

I have a friend, an engineer, who built a brick oven out in his yard. It takes a while to get it going so you want to have enough to bake in it once you get it going. They have found that it is good for roasting a large hunk of meat in but have not had as much success with baking dough in it.

He also has a satellite in his yard that he built . He is an electrical engineer who has built systems for NASA, a rocket scientist, if you will, so why would he not build a satellite for his yard? and a brick oven? He builds and she is a gifted cook who takes well deserved pride in her cooking skills. If any couple of folks ever needed both a satellite and an brick oven, it is these two.

We did get the pizza oven to work without burning up the pizza, but the edges always come out a bit crispy (almost but not quite black), but that's how I like it. I've also made naan on the Ooni pizza oven, and I like it better than the naan I've made on a griddle.

I also use a yogurt dough to make naan, and it does not have sugar in it. I've made pita on the griddle, and that works fine. I have a very large round griddle in L.A. plus a somewhat smaller Mexican comal, and I use both when making pita so that I can cook two at once. I bought the large round griddle to make pizza, but I've not been happy with it for that and prefer to cook directly on the pizza stone in my oven. I do not have a large griddle in Cathedral City, but I do have a nice rectangular one that fits onto the large oval burner on the stove there, but it's not very wide. I use it mainly for pancakes.

lars, I brought back two nice comals from Mexico many years ago. These are nice ones and the are second in use to my iron skillets. I use them a lot.

I used to make yoghurt naan a lot. My recipe was even simpler, definitely no sugar. The technique I used was to cook one side on the hot skillet until it started to puff, then slide it out of the skillet and under the broiler for a couple of minutes. It puffed up like a pita then sank down when it was taken out. This made it great for snacks the next day, open it up and fill with cheese and whatever (or just cheese) and heat to melt.