Naan bread on the barbecue. Pretty sure at least one of these was drenched in melted butter and devoured shortly after this photo was taken.
In the spirit of foodie sharing, I made the most amazing naan bread this weekend. It was soft, tender, and perfectly grilled on the barbecue; I slathered it in melted butter before using it to sop up the sauce from a chickpea curry. What could be better?
Thanks to the huge range of sauces and pastes sold in jars from the likes of Patak’s and Sharwood’s, it’s never been easier to make Indian curries at home without spending hours grinding spices and simmering pots on a hot stove. But what about the naan?
I’ve never met a supermarket naan bread that comes even close to the real thing from a good Indian restaurant. The packaged stuff is always too puffy, dry and flavourless. And bad naan, well … it can ruin an otherwise tasty Indian meal, and who’d want that? I long ago realised that if I wanted to make a good Indian meal at home, I’d have to learn to make my own naan.
After a few attempts over the past year, including one from a recipe in a popular series of cookbooks (which shall remain nameless) that left me with a serving plate piled high with floppy slabs of baked dough that tasted like flattened tea biscuits, I finally found a recipe that’s as easy to make as it is delicious.
So without further ado, here’s the link to the recipe from All Recipes. I’d call the recipe easy to easy-intermediate. If you know how to bake bread, it’s pretty basic.
First of, I used my stand mixer to do the kneading; it took about 7 or 8 minutes to reach the right state of kneadedness. I found that 4 cups of bread flour was more than enough to form the dough, not the recommended 4.5 cups, so don’t add all the flour at once; start at 3.5 cups, then add more if needed.
Also, riffing on a suggestion from someone in the recipe comments, I added half a teaspoon of baking powder to get some extra bubbly lift on the hot grill. I didn’t bother with the garlic addition, as I figured I could add some garlic butter if I really needed the garlic taste on a few slices. Oh, and if your barbecue is reasonably hot, less than a minute per side is more than enough to get a perfectly grilled piece of naan. The 2 to 3 minutes called for in the recipe would have yielded flat bricks of charcoal on my grill.