To naan, or not to naan

So, Indian food was on the menu a few nights ago. I've got a cabinet full of basmati rice and Indian spices, so I didn't even have to call for takeout. Dinner was ground meat with peas, spicy green beans and basmati rice. So, of course, with Indian food, one needs Indian bread. Naan bread. Back to the flour...

Naan bread is a yeast dough with added yogurt. Making the dough is actually the easy part - figuring out how to bake the stuff is something else entirely. Traditionally, naan is cooked in a tandoor, a clay oven. Don't know about you, but MY kitchen didn't come with a tandoor, so I had to adapt. My recipe called for an oven and a "grill", which I think is British for a broiler. Since I have an oven, but don't have a separate grill, I went a-surfin' to see what I could find out about how to bake the stuff. Lucky for me, there are lots of places to get web advice, even YouTube, which has a lovely video about how to make and bake naan. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXOSO6nU_Z8 I tried the YouTube approach, with the grill rack and ended up scraping the bread off the rack, as it puffed DOWN rather than up. Watching the video again, I see grill marks on top of the bread as she pulls it out of the oven, so she must have flipped it over during the baking. Live and learn...

So, to make naan (as adapted from Madhur Jaffrey's Indian Cooking)

5 oz. warm milk

2 tsp sugar

3 tsp yeast

about 1 lb (around 3 cups) of flour

1/2 tsp salt

1 tsp baking powder

2 tbl + 1 tsp vegetable oil

5 oz. plain yogurt

1 large egg, lightly beaten

Mix the milk, 1 tsp. sugar and yeast in a small bowl and allow the yeast to proof. Mix the flour, salt, and baking powder in a large bowl (I use a large stainless steel bowl from the restaurant supply store). Add the remaining sugar, the yeast mixture, 2 tbl oil, yogurt and egg. Mix everything together to form a ball. If its too sticky, all a little more flour until you have a nice springy dough. Knead the dough for about 10 minutes (I just leave it in the bowl and knead away - I'm lazy about cleaning my kitchen, so this contains the mess really well) until it is smooth and "satiny" (I'm not really sure how dough can be like satin, but that's what all the cookbooks say, so that's what it must be). Roll the dough into a ball and transfer it to a clean mixing bowl. Pour the remaining 1 tsp of oil over the dough, and roll the dough around to coat it in oil. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and a dishtowel and let it rise for about 90 minutes, or until doubled in bulk.

Preheat your oven to 475 degrees and put your largest, heaviest baking sheet into the oven about 1/3 of the way down from your heating element. Dump the dough onto a floured cutting board and divide it into 6 equal parts. Flatten two pieces into rough teardrop shapes, then open your oven and slap the dough onto the baking sheet. Let it bake for about 3-4 minutes, until it puffs up. Using tongs, grab the dough and turn it over on the baking sheet. Let it bake about another 5-7 minutes, until it is brown and puffy, then pull it out of the oven with the tongs. Shape and bake the remaining dough in the same way. Serve the naan hot with your favorite Indian meal (take out is fine - I won't tell :)

Beard on Banana Bread

So, my household had a thing about bananas. We buy 'em, we leave 'em in the fruit bowl and two weeks later we throw rotten brown objects in the trash. That's not counting the one that stayed in Fish's backpack for a few months and emerged petrified....

This time, just as I was approaching the trash can, I had a "Eureka" moment. Banana bread! With cream cheese. Okay, so on to the flour bin. Again, adapted from Beard on Bread. My antique copy is pictured at left. Purchased when I was in college, now yellowed and nearly falling apart. Someday I'll replace it (just not yet - that would mean admitting I'm getting old enough to outlive my possessions. Never!)

So, sift 2 cups of flour, 1 tsp baking soda, and 0.5 tsp salt into a medium-sized bowl. In another bowl (usually the bowl of my stand mixer, but you can do this by hand), cream 0.5 cup butter (that's one stick) and 1 cup granulated sugar. This is easier if the butter is not fridge-cold. Room temp is good, which can be approximated by microzapping the butter (wrap and all) for 10 seconds before plopping it in the bowl. In a third bowl, mash 2 very ripe, medium-sized bananas. Crack 2 eggs, add them to the mashed banana and mix well. In a fourth bowl (you do have someone to wash your dishes for you, don't you?), mix 0.33 cup milk and 1 tsp lemon juice. First, add the banana and eggs to the butter/sugar mixture. Now, add about one-third of the flour mixture to the butter/sugar/banana/egg mixture and mix briefly. Add half the milk/lemon juice and mix again. Add half the remaining flour mixture and mix well, add the rest of the milk/lemon juice and mix well, and finish up by adding the last of the flour mixture. Mix the whole shebang until it looks uniform and all the dry ingredients are well-blended. Now add 0.5 cup chopped walnuts (or pecans, or whatever you have lying around in your nut drawer), mix a little bit more (so all your nuts aren't in one big pile) and spoon the batter into a "lavishly buttered" 9x5x3 inch pan (don't ya just LOVE James Beard?). Bake the loaf in a preheated 350 degree oven for about 50-55 minutes. Check for doneness with a toothpick test (mine invariably ends up with a tiny raw spot somewhere near the middle of the loaf - gotta learn to use my toothpick in a couple of places). Let the loaf cool, slide it out of its pan, slice it and slather it with cream cheese. Good for breakfast, good for snack, good for just about anything (except possibly for use as a hockey puck - its a little fragile for this).

The flour (part two) OR the point of this blog

Why, you may wonder, are you reading this blog? Well, on this end, it's "Why, I may wonder, am I writing this blog?" Well, credit Julie and Julia (great movie - likely to spawn tons of wannabe blogger-writers. Like me. Don't like it? Move on to the next one). To answer this, here's the flour, in its raw form. I transfer about 5 lb aliquots to a large Rubbermaid container (because 25 lbs of flour is REALLY HARD to manipulate in a kitchen the size of a mousetrap). Since I made the trip to get the stuff, I decided I wanted to remember what I had done with it. My first approach was the Post-It on the lid of the container - a quick note about what I made, along with the date. Straightforward, but not very entertaining. So, with the infinite storage space of the internet, I decided to try this blogging thing. In this age of all things digital, its trivial to shoot a pic, pop it up here, and write a couple of maudlin sentences about whatever is I manufactured, and get on with my day. So, my question to myself is answered. The question I posed to you still stands...

What to bake, what to bake?

Okay, so the flour came home (only shedding a little bit in the trunk of the Prius). Now, what to use it for? Last weekend, spaghetti was on the menu for Saturday night, so focaccia came to mind. I use a recipe from Beard on Bread, slightly adapted to use fresh rosemary from my garden.

The basic ingredients for the bread are:

2.5 cups flour

0.5 tsp salt

2 teaspoons dry yeast (I use Red Star - bulk package. Its been in my fridge forever.)

1 cup warm-to-hot tap water

Mix everything together, then knead, knead, knead until it feels springy and not sticky. Add more flour if its too sticky. I do all of my kneading in a large stainless steel bowl from the restaurant supply store (because I'm really lazy and hate cleaning the counter/cutting board/cat once I've kneaded dough on the counter). Stick the dough in a clean bowl, loosely cover with plastic wrap and a dishtowel and leave the puppy alone until it rises (usually 90 minutes-2 hours). I went to the beach, 'cause I live in SoCal and it was a beautiful day. When I got back, I was tanned and sandy, and the dough was about twice the size that it started out - perfect.

Then punch down the dough, knead it a bit, adding 1-2 tbl. more flour if it feels sticky, then pat it out into a rough circle about 0.5 inches thick on a baking sheet. I have a 12-inch pizza pan that I use for this purpose (a word of wisdom...grease the pan first!). Drizzle about 1 tbl olive oil over the bread and use your hands to spread it evenly over the dough. Then slice two cloves of garlic into thin slices (my garlic came from a recent road trip through Gilroy, California, the garlic capitol of the world - you can smell it long before you reach it). Cut little slits evenly spaced in the dough (about 1.5 inches apart works well) and stick a garlic slice into each slit. Head out into your yard and cut several healthy sprigs of rosemary (I suppose you could buy rosemary too, but out here, it grows like a weed. If you don't have any in your yard, feel free to raid your neighbor's shrub. Or prune the display in the street median). Artistically sprinkle about 1.5 tbl fresh rosemary needles over the bread, then sprinkle on about 1.5 tsp of kosher salt (other fancy large-grain salt will work too, but PLEASE don't use Morton's from the blue can - it just doesn't give the same effect). Admire your handiwork, then go away again for about 30 minutes. This is the ideal time to make a martini, or a margarita or a moscow mule, or whatever the heck else you feel like drinking. When the drink is gone, fire up your oven to 400 degrees. The dough should look slightly puffy, but not huge. Pop the pizza pan/baking sheet into the oven and bake for about 15 minutes. I compulsively check the oven about every 5 minutes, and rotate the bread around if one side looks like its browning too fast. When 15 minutes is up (or when your bread looks nice and toasty brown) take it out of the oven, slice it into wedges (or just rip it apart if you really can't wait that long) and eat it. Plain is good, but dipped in olive oil is even better.

The Mill

Lehi Roller Mills, Lehi, Utah has been around for just over 100 years. Its on the west side of I-15 and quite visible from the freeway (at least while driving south). Years ago, when I was living in Salt Lake City, my husband commuted to a job site in Provo. He'd stop by the Roller Mills once every few months and pick up flour, or cracked wheat cereal, or brownie mix, or whatever jumped into his hand that day. Since moving to California, I've missed his trips to the mill (and my chance to try new goodies every once in a while). I still go back to Utah on occasion, and when those occasions involve driving a car, I try to stop at the mill. Now, driving the flour home takes about 12 hours, but as far as I'm concerned, its still worth the trip. I took my kids, Fish and Sprout, there a couple of years ago and got them hooked as well. So, there's usually a family outing to the mill any time we are anywhere near Lehi.

Trivia note: the mill was featured in the movie "Footloose". Apparently, its where Kevin Bacon's character was employed. I haven't seen the movie, so I can't vouch for the accuracy of this note, but its all over the Internet, so it must be true!