Who does not love a naan? A soft, enriched dough, mildly salty and slightly charred, flash-cooked for big bubbles with a crispy exterior and pillowy inside, it is the most indulgent flatbread to scoop up spicy Indian curries.
‘Naan’, a word that just means bread in Persian, is a flatbread native to west, central and southern Asia. It is baked in a clay oven at very high temperatures, rather than over a flame like the chapati, which gives it a crisp exterior, a fluffy core and a distinctive charred flavour.
Naan is made from an enriched dough which means that there are other ingredients added beyond the flour, water, yeast, and salt to make the bread. In naan usually you will find some sort of dairy like yogurt, milk, ghee, butter or even egg at times.
Making naan is a lot like making pizza at home. You want the oven to be heated as hot as possible, and you want the quickest transfer of heat to the dough as you can. This will create a perfectly cooked crust with a doughy interior.
You can either cook the naan in an aluminium cooker (see pictures) or in the oven to get the crispy delicious naan. I usually cook it in my cooker ( you can see the well used state of the cooker in the pictures :-)) and they turn out perfect every time. Oven results are the same and I cook the naans in oven when I have large gatherings or when my daughter insists on helping me as oven method is safer to use with children.
