Tag: skillet

Skillet Flatbread

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For those who caught the last post flatbread has not been my friend this week. It’s been a struggle trying to figure it out, but today we made it!

This is what success looks like

Ingredients

  • 2 cups all purpose flour
  • 2 tablespoons melted butter
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 2/3 cup water
  • either butter or oil to fry in

Directions

  1. Put flour and salt in a medium size mixing bowl and whisk to combine.
  2. Melt butter in microwave for about a minute.
  3. Put melted butter and water in bowl with dry ingredients and combine with either a wooden spoon or plastic spatula until dough comes together. It shouldn’t be wet or shaggy looking. It should come together nice and smooth.
  4. Flour your work surface and rolling pin. You don’t want the flatbread to stick. Roll them roughly 1/8th of an inch thick. They should be VERY thin. You’re looking for them to be the size of a small tortilla(approx. 6 inches across) They won’t puff and cook properly if you don’t roll them out thin enough. Also make sure you pat a lot of the excess flour off the dough.
  5. Heat your pan to slightly above medium heat and put either the butter or oil in the pan. Wait for the butter to melt or the oil to shimmer in the pan and move like water.
  6. Cook them for about 10 seconds on one side and then flip them. Cook them for roughly a minute on that side. You’re looking for small brown spots to appear on the dough. When that starts to happen you want to flip it and cook it for roughly a minute on the other side. You want them to be soft and buttery.
  7. Put them on a paper towel covered plate and lightly sprinkle them with salt. Continue cooking till all batter is gone.

Learning how to make this flatbread was an adventure full of tremendous lows. I was losing hope that I would ever get it right. Then it just all fell into place this morning. My suggestion for these flatbread are as a tortilla for a breakfast taco.

Breakfast of Champions

Flippin Flatbread Man…

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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

https://thefoodcharlatan.com/roti-buttery-indian-flatbread/