Grilled Garlic Naan

I really, really love naan. I had never made it myself before moving to Ten Forward with the Captain - she found this recipe online a few summers ago, and sometime in the past year it turned from one of the things that she is usually in charge of making from one of the things I am usually in charge of making, which in my opinion is pretty great. Most likely I started making it under her supervision because I wanted her to teach me, then it just became habit. Regardless, naan is wonderful and this recipe is pretty stellar. It is rather time consuming - very much a slaving over a hot stove/grill type of thing - but I think it's worth it and I'm always confused about why we don't make it more often. I had been mentioning for a while that we needed to make something it would go well with, then Monday I came home from a trip to New Orleans (which I almost forgot to go on! This is true.) with a copy of the latest America's Test Kitchen/Cook's Illustrated Cooking for Two magazine which had a pretty excellent looking tandoori chicken recipe ins. Captain Letdown made that, and started the naan while I was at work, and I took it over when I got home. Also there was raita, but I believe she's going to be posting about the chicken and the raita, since she made them. It was a very excellent food evening, and there was much naan-documenting, so here we are. Incidentally, this makes an extremely good amount of naan. Four people (maybe three, I can eat a pretty spectacular amount of naan) who love bread can finish it off in one sitting, but the leftovers are excellent, so we never cut the recipe down.


Grilled Garlic Naan
original recipe

2.25 t (teaspoons) active dry yeast (this is the equivalent of one packet, if you don't buy by the jar like we do)

1 cup warm water (like any bread recipe, you want this to be lukewarm to skin temperature, but not hot, which will kill your yeast)

1/4 cup white sugar

3 T (tablespoons) milk

1 egg

2 t salt

4.5 cups bread flour

oil for the bowl and the grill

2 t minced garlic (optional, but really, why wouldn't you)

1/4 cup butter, melted

     About three hours before you want to be eating naan, start by proofing the yeast - dissolve it into the warm water with a pinch of your sugar and let it stand about ten minutes, or until it's frothy and excited. I usually just proof in the liquid measuring cup I was measuring the water into. If it doesn't get frothy and excited, either your water was too hot and you killed the yeast, or the yeast wasn't good to start with. Try again!

      While the yeast is proofing, whisk together your flour, salt, and the rest of the sugar in a large bowl. Add your egg - either it should be already beaten, or you can push the dry ingredients to one side, add the egg to the empty side, and beat it there. I do this because I am lazy and want to wash fewer dishes. Add the milk and the yeast, when it's proofed, and stir it together to make a soft dough. Knead it together until it's smooth, about 6-8 minutes.

 You can transfer it to a lightly floured surface, or do it right in the bowl (again, fewer dishes) if your bowl makes this practical - that is, if it's large enough and not sharply angled. The bowl really should be pretty big, as the doubled dough is sizable. We use a giant metal mixing bowl we somehow inherited from Mary Menville. Oil your bowl pretty well (before you move it back, or just pick the dough up for a minute) and put the dough in it, turn it over to get both sides with oil (this keeps it from drying out during the rise) and cover your bowl with a damp towel or cloth (this also keeps it from drying out during the rise.)

Put it somewhere  warm and draft free and let it rise until doubled in volume - this takes roughly an hour, depending on how active your yeast is and how warm your rising spot is. We tend to put rising dough in the oven, with just the oven light on to generate a bit of warmth. Towards the end of this time you should prepare your garlic, if you're using it, which you should.

       When the dough is doubled, punch it down and knead in the garlic. Pinch off small handfuls of dough and roll them into balls about the size of a golf ball, and place them on a tray (we use two baking sheets) to rise again, once more covered by damp towel(s). 

This rise, also until doubled in size, should only take about half an hour. Toward the end of this time you should preheat your grill - as you can see in the pictures, we use a cast iron grill pan on the stovetop, which I keep at medium to medium high heat. The original recipe says high heat, but our heavy cast iron gets very hot, so medium high is plenty. Due to the melted butter that's coming up, the recipe generates plenty of smoke even without actually burning your naan, so, you know, watch out for that. We usually end up cracking a window, but we've never set off the smoke alarm making this (hooray!).
 

     When your balls of dough are doubled and your grill is hot, lightly oil the grill and melt the butter and put it and a brush of some sort by the grill. Now is when the slaving over a hot stove comes in. Also the smoke. Take the first ball of dough, and stretch it with your hands (the original recipe says roll it out, but I think this works better) into as thin a circle as you can -

I look for maybe five to seven inches across, and the circle idea can get pretty vague. Many of mine end up shaped approximately like one continental mass or another. So, the stretching: I start by flattening the dough a bit with my palms, then grasping the edges of the disk between my thumb and forefinger and putting my other fingers under the edge and then spreading them apart a bit. Turn a bit, repeat, turn, and so on until it's about as thin and regular as it seems like it's going to get. I hold it at the top and let gravity stretch the bottom a little at the same time. It ends up with a bit of a thicker rim around the edge, but that's fine. Alternately, stretch or flatten them however works for you. Regardless, flatten the first one, then place it flat on the grill.

Brush some melted butter on the exposed side. Let it cook until it gets a bit puffy and the bottom is nicely grill marked, one to three minutes (this is when I start stretching the next piece of naan) turn it (I use tongs) and brush the newly exposed other side with butter. Grill until this side is marked and doesn't look like raw dough - this will be shorter than the first side, maybe just a minute. Remove to a plate, and place your next piece on the grill, and repeat the whole process over (and over and over!). When all the naan has been grilled, feast upon it with gladness. (Illustration: a happy girl with a massive pile of naan.)