It is absolutely possible to do restaurant-quality garlic naan at home, without a tandoor, in
a pan, on the stove. Any stove. We're not even gonna use the oven.
I'm not gonna lie, I had quite a few hilarious fails before I got this method down, but I
mean, the results speak for themselves. First, dough.
A fascinating thing about Indian-style breads is the diversity of leaveners used. This right
here is probably the original one — curd. Yogurt. Crucially, yogurt containing live,
active bacterial cultures.
You mix this into some flour, and in time, they will puff it up a bit. Then we get dried
yeast, and finally, chemical leaveners — baking soda and baking powder.
Here's the book from which I first started learning about Indian cooking over 20 years,
and her naan recipe calls for ALL. THE. LEAVENERS. All three kinds. It's like millennia of baking
history all piled up in one place.
And for years, I've baked this recipe by simply cooking the naan under the broiler on a pizza
stone, and that gets you a very tasty little flatbread, but it is not the naan I know and
love from Indian restaurants. That is. I've had much better luck getting that effect with
a no-yeast dough.
Two cups of all-purpose flour, like 250 grams. Thats enough for four loaves. A teaspoon of
sugar enhances browning. I might just do half a teaspoon of salt. You could want more, but
I prefer to top my naan with some more salt at the end. A teaspoon of baking powder — double-acting
baking powder — I think that helps the texture.
And then just a scant 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda to neutralize the yogurt that's coming
after a couple tablespoons of any oil you want. I'm using olive oil. About 1/4 cup of
yogurt — 60g or so. And then just enough milk or water to bring this together. I started
with half a cup, like 100 ml and then I ended up kneading in maybe 50% more.
Most western dough recipes, including my own, generally tell you to start with an overly
wet dough and to keep kneading in flour until the texture is right. Every Indian dough recipe
I've seen does the opposite — they start dry and then knead in liquid. And the right
texture for this is nice and soft but just barely sticky. It's dryer than pizza dough.
It should be just a little sticky, and the gluten is developed enough when it kinda bounces
back at you, like that.
I'll oil this to keep it from drying out. And it's a quick bread. You could cook it
right now, it would taste OK, but you wouldn't get many bubbles. I've found you need to let
it sit for at least a half hour under a wet towel, but it gets better with time. Leave
it for many hours, if you can.
OK, now let me also show you a version with yeast. Almost the same as before. A couple
cups of flour, teaspoon sugar, half teaspoon of salt, teaspoon of dry yeast (bloom it if
you want to be safe), and a little baking powder too. Half a teaspoon. Most naan recipes
with yeast seem to call for some baking powder as well. I don't fully understand how they
interact, but there's a few great threads about that topic on pizzamaking.com. I've
linked those in the description.
A couple tablespoons of olive oil, and — this is important — just a little yogurt. Like
a tablespoon. Too much yogurt and yeast together and it becomes a cake, not a bread. I think
it's all the acidity weakening the gluten structure. A little more milk or water this
time, because we have less moisture from the yogurt. I think I did a cup total until I
got the right texture. Remember — smooth, soft and only slightly sticky. Like any yeast
bread, this has to rise for at least an hour at room temperature.
Here's the no-yeast version after a couple hours, and to my surprise, it has puffed up
a bit. I'm not sure the extent to which that's the chemical leavening or the live bacteria
in the yogurt. But lots of Indian no-yeast naan recipes tell you to leave it for many
hours in a warm place. I think they're depending on those bacteria in the curd.
If you don't kneed this a little bit more shortly before you cook it, the naan tends
to blow up one, huge bubble. My goal is three or four smaller bubbles, hence the last-minute
kneading. And there's our four dough balls, ready to bake.
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OK, let's bake our no-yeast naan. Some people roll this out with flour. I've found it's
a lot easier to just let it stick to my counter. The sticking helps. It keeps it the dough
steady and stops it from immediately snapping back. The way you keep it from sticking to
the rolling pin is to simply roll outward and off, outward and off. That's instead of
rolling back and fourth. If you rolled it back and fourth it would stick. I think the
perfect thickness is just slightly less than the thinnest you could possibly roll it.
Now garlic. Small difference can be very big in a simple food — in this case, I'm talking
about how you cut the garlic. I grated this garlic, which I gather is one of the traditional
methods here. Chopped garlic gives you pebbly pieces that tend to fall out of the bread.
Thin, stringly pieces from a grater or from a garlic press seem to adhere a lot better.
Crushing it with salt would give you a similar effect as well — thin, stingy pieces that
stick well to the dough. A little fresh chopped cilantro, as well. This is like pizza — you
can top it with whatever you want. Be more creative than me.
But one thing that I really like is this traditional method of rolling the toppings into the dough.
This really embeds them — makes them part of the bread, while still maintaining some
heterogeneity. Last step right before you cook it is to wet the bottom side a little
bit. This dissolves the surface starch and creates a sticky layer of literal paste that
you would use to make this stick to the inside wall of a tandoor, which is a vertical oven.
In our case, we want it to stick to a cast iron skillet on medium heat. Every stove is
different — I've found that medium, or a little less than medium, is the right temperature
on my stove, but that took experimentation to find out.
To do this method, an Indian cook might use a flat, round griddle pan called a tawa. It's
a pan with no sides. I've found my cast iron skillet works pretty well, too. Stainless
steel has not done as well for me, but maybe you could make it work.
This method depends on the dough sticking to the pan, so we can't unstick it to check
the bottom. We just have to guess when it's cooked, and that took me a lot of practice.
After just a minute or two, you should see some bubbles blowing up. I am not sure the
extent to which those bubbles are from the double-acting baking powder reacting at high
heat to make carbon dioxide, or if they are simply steam from inside or underneath the
dough.
I suspect it's mostly steam, since lots of recipes don't use baking powder at all — only
baking soda to react with the acid in the yogurt. That reaction happened instantaneously
two hours ago. So I think this is mostly steam inflating bubbles that were initially created
by the chemical leaveners, though my experiments indicate that the double-acting baking powder
also helps to aerate the texture a bit.
After a couple minutes you should see the edges starting to look dry and cooked. I've
also had good success using my nose to tell when the bottom is done. Basically at the
first tiny whiff of a burned smell, it's time to cook the top.
For standard tawa naan, you would invert the pan and then cook it over the open flame of
a gas stove. But I've found it works just as well with a cast iron skillet, and just
as well on my electric resistance-coil stove. I just jack the heat up to high, and rest
the upside-down pan right over the burner. The only kind of stove this wouldn't work
on is an induction stove, because induction doesn't heat the air. I'll give the induction
folks an option later.
I want to see some smoke coming out. My goal is to get some singeing on the bubbles, while
the rest of the surface should still look almost raw. That is key to the restaurant-style
naan that I'm familiar well. Parts of the surface should still be quite doughy.
That's done. And if you're thinking it doesn't look like naan yet, that's because you're
missing the final ingredient — a generous brushing of melted butter at the end. I'm
using salted butter to compliment the slightly under-seasoned dough.
The final remaining challenge is to unstick the bread from the pan. It would be a lot
easier to scrape this out of a tawa, which has no sides to get in your way. And yeah,
this one is gonna stick on me. You know what I realized?
I baked like 50 naan in a weekend to prep for this video, and I'd really messed up the
seasoning coat on my cast iron. So I did a very quick re-seasoning. Clean pan on high,
a little spray of oil, wipe it thin, let it burn until it stops smoking. Once I had an
OK seasoning layer again, my naan started sticking when I wanted it to stick, and releasing
when I wanted it to release.
Ironically, the starch paste glue on the bottom tended to not stick well enough when I tried
this in a stainless steel pan. My naan just fell out. Much better results in the cast
iron.
A little too much color on that one, but nice. This tawa-style naan is amazing at replicating
the effect of a tandoor. If we simply cooked it in a pan in oil, it would taste like fried
bread. But this tastes baked — because the bottom cooked on that little layer of starch
paste instead of fat, and the top simply cooked in very hot, dry air. That gets you crispy
bubbles and a baked flavor.
You could maybe replicate that effect by transferring the pan under a very hot broiler to brown
the top, but you know what doesn't work? Blasting it with a kitchen torch. I thought that might
work, but all it did was burn the garlic.
Now, for some reason, the no-yeast dough seems to work better for tawa-style naan. Most recipes
for tawa naan I've seen call for for no yeast. I'll show you what the yeast dough does with
this method.
I'll knead it again after a couple hours of rising, divide it into balls and then proof
them for a little bit – at least 15 minutes to get a second release of gas.
Oh, by the way, you have to give the pan a very quick wash and dry after each naan that
you cook. A lot of residue from the previous naan could interfere with the sticking process.
Back to my yeast dough. I'll roll one out and top it as before, wet the bottom to make
it sticky, on the pan it goes, and for me, the yeast dough just tends to puff up evenly.
Lots of tiny little bubbles all through the dough. I'm not getting any giant bubbles that
will go crisp when I invert the pan to brown the top. I've also found that, for some reason,
the yeast dough doesn't stick quite as securely. Gah!
Well anyways, brush that with butter. Perfect color on the bottom there. I would say the
flavor of this one is superior, because yeast fermentation is delicious. But the texture
is inferior. It's like a Western dinner roll. It doesn't have those crisp filo-esque bubbly
layers. Maybe it take the intense heat of a tandoor to get that from a yeast dough.
With the tawa-style method, I would absolutely do the no-yeast dough again.
Now, what if you have an induction stove? Or, what if you're simply too scared to do
the whole pan-inversion move? Well, you absolutely can cook the bread until it's done on the
bottom and then just flip it. Just brown the other side a bit. A little more than that.
But not too much more. I think a key with any naan is letting the surface remain a little
doughy. That looks OK.
The texture's not as good as if we'd cooked the top with hot air, but it still tastes
like naan, because we cooked it without oil. It tastes baked, and not fried.
So, if you're feeling brave, give this tawa-style method a shot. Again, it really took me a
lot of practice and I've hardly mastered it, but the results are pretty extraordinary.