Baking Steel Naan

Naan

Recipe Adapted from Neelam Batra, 1000 Indian Recipes

Yield: 10 Naan
Ingredients

• 7 g Dry Yeast (1 packet)
• 5 g Sugar
• 60 g Warm Water
• 220 g Plain Non-fat Yogurt
• 20 g Vegetable Oil
• 330 g AP or Bread Flour
• 2.5 g Kosher Salt or to taste
• Bench Flour
• Melted Butter or Ghee

Cooking Directions

1. Place the Baking Steel on a shelf at the second level below your oven's broiler. Preheat the oven to 500 or 550 F.
2. Combine the yeast, sugar and warm water in a small bowl.
3. When the yeast mixture is frothy combine it with the yogurt and vegetable oil. Whisk until a smooth homogenous mixture is achieved.
4. Place the flour and salt in a food processor fitted with the metal blade. Cover and pulse once or twice to combine.
5. Add the yogurt mixture and process until a smooth ball is formed. It should be quite soft and a little sticky. If necessary, add a little more flour (if too wet) or yogurt (if too dry) and continue to process.
6. Place the dough ball in a lightly oiled bowl, rotating to coat it with oil, cover with foil, and allow it to double in volume, about 1 hour in a warm kitchen.





7. When the dough has doubled in volume, lightly flour your work surface and hands and roll the dough into a a log about 10 inches long.
8. Cut nine 12 inch squares of wax paper.





9. When the oven is preheated cut the log into 10 sections.
10. Roll out each ball into an 8 inch disk. Stack each naan, separated by a piece of wax paper. Cover the pile with the damp towel.
11. Switch the oven to broil.





12. Stretch the first naan into the characteristic triangular shape.
13. Carefully toss the naan onto the Baking Steel.





15 Seconds






60 Seconds



14. Cook for about 90 seconds. Adjust the naan's location with tongs to optimize browning.
15. Remove the naan with tongs, brush generously with melted butter and set aside, covered.
16. Continue until all are cooked.
17. Serve hot.

Notes: 

Quantities: The original recipe is expressed in cups and teaspoons and is, perhaps, somewhat inaccurate. (If you have Batra's book, you'll see that I used considerably more yogurt.) I weighed everything out as I measured for this version. Use caution and good sense if you choose to give it a try. As always with bread recipes, the exact amount of liquid will vary somewhat depending on you flour, the weather, and the whims of Hestia.

Flour: I used King Arthur Bread Flour.

Bonci Dough & The Modernist Baking Steel

In my seemingly endless quest to make the perfect pizza (whatever that is) I recently came across something called The Baking Steel. This is nothing more than a heavy slab of treated steel that replaces the more traditional pizza stone. It has a couple obvious advantages: 1) it will never break and 2) its enormous thermal mass means even a rather wet pizza is going to cook very quickly. The big disadvantage is cost - $99. Nevertheless...

I had made a full batch on Bonci style dough for Tomato and Black Olive Focaccia over the weekend and still had two of the dough balls in the freezer when my Baking Steel arrived. So it seemed reasonable to use one of those for my first trial.

But first, I loaded the Baking Steel into the oven on a rack at the third from the top level. This is one level lower than suggested in the guidelines the company supplies, but I was pretty sure my pizza would be quite a bit taller than is typical. Pre-heat at 550 F for an hour and then...

Bonci Dough - Full Batch

Ingredients

• 1000 gm Bread Flour
• 800 gm Tepid Water
• 7 gm Yeast
• 20 gm Salt
• 40 gm Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Those quantities result in 3 big (about 600 gram), very soft dough balls. This dough is far too soft and sticky to ever slide off a peel on its own (after all it's meant to be baked on sheet pans). So I stretched one ball onto a piece of well oiled aluminum foil.

You can see from the wrinkling around the dough that it's already grabbing the foil in spite of the oiling.

Toppings were Neapolitan style: crushed tomatoes, fresh (as in made that morning) Valley Shepherd Creamery Mozzarella, a bit of crushed oregano and sea salt. Slide it onto the Baking Steel and about 10 minutes later I turned the broiler on high. After another minute I rotated the pizza and another minute later out it came:

2 inches of crispy and delicious

Yep. The Baking Steel worked exactly as advertised. Since we make pizza or some type of bread at least once a week, its worth the $99 (there's a thinner model for $79). It makes a tremendous difference in the the quality of what comes out of my oven.