There’s so much flour on my floor…
I need an apron…
Literally my internal monologue every time I bake. Anyway…
So I decided this week to try something new. I wanted flatbread. I wanted it bad guys. I’d seen someone on Bon Appetit do it so I thought I could too. Nothing I’ve baked so far has failed so this will be fine. This was definitely not how that went.
The first recipe I tried was from King Arthur Flour. It was for a skillet flatbread. The biggest thing I learned from this process is i’m not quite certain what an 1/8th of an inch looks like. My flatbread were very thick even though I thought I squished the ever living heck out of them. I also either had too hot of a pan or I tried to cook them for too long because the oil I was frying them in burned the outside. You know flatbread is supposed to have nice brown spots on the outside to let you know its done cooking. The spots these had were not that. The spots these had were the sad kind that makes your house smell like burnt toast. Then when you broke into them the smell of raw dough hits your nose. Quite frankly the whole thing was a damn disaster.
So the next day I tried something different. I tried Indian Roti. It was a similar dough except the oil was replaced with butter. It called for pretty much ALL the butter. The needed to be thin and soft and delicious. They also needed to be rolled out nearly paper thin so it would puff when you fried them. I was pretty sure I was right on track to do it properly. They rolled out nicely. I had to use quite a lot of flour to get them to roll out and not stick. This looking back was not great. I put my butter in my medium heat pan and it melted nicely. Then I put the roti in and pretty instantly all my butter browned.
Now don’t get me wrong brown butter is great when it’s what you want, but this had crossed over into burnt. I don’t know if the roti had too much flour on it going in the butter but they were very dark and oily. Through all the burnt butter and weird puffing that proved I didn’t roll them thin enough like I thought they did get closer then the other bunch. The browned without charring and one out of the five I made seemed to cook all the way through. It was still brown and not attractive but I was close.
Truly I don’t know what I could’ve done differently with that second batch. Different butter? Lower temp on my pan? Possibly a thinner roll? I will definitely try the second recipe again because I got closer to a finished product.
I definitely want to be able to cook fresh flatbread with my curry. Fresh baked is always better then store bought so we’ll see what happens next time.
Here’s the links to the recipes I tried:
https://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/skillet-flatbreads-recipe
Rogue Woman Bakes 