For many years I’ve been fascinated by variations on yeast-free yogurt flatbread recipes (sometimes called yeast-free naan) that follow a loose formula of a cup of yogurt, a couple cups of flour, some salt, fat, and water. Sometimes there’s baking powder, sometimes there’s not. It’s kneaded together as you would a yeasted bread dough and left to rest for about 30 minutes, sometimes an hour, during which a transformation occurs and the dough becomes springy and smooth and very lovely to work with, like a freshly-opened can of Play-Doh. Once rolled thin, they’re pan-fried, and look, they’re fiiine. But they’re never as good as I want them to be.
add yogurt to dry ingredientsknead into a smooth balllet restdivide into eighths
With yeast scarce, I decided to revisit these flatbreads early in our Inside Days and see if I could make headway with them using scallion pancakes as my guide. The core of scallion pancakes [and, updated to add, other flatbreads such as parathas, parottas, roti canai, and malawach] is also a simple, yeast-free, dough, also kneaded and left to rest before you roll it out. But instead of frying them right away, you brush them with oil, sprinkle them with scallions (for scallion pancakes), and roll the pancake into a tight cigar, and then the cigar into a snail. This snail of wound dough is left to rest again, and then rolled into the final pancake. The hidden layers of flour and oil help the layers lift and separate into flaky layers as you fry the pancakes. And this layering, it turned out, was exactly what my one-dimensional yogurt flatbreads were missing.
brush very thinly with butter or oilroll into a cigarcan cover them with your empty bowlready to roll after second rest
From the outside, they look like any other tender, stretchy flatbread, but as you tear a piece off, an inner accordion emerges. And waft of buttered air. They deflate fairly fast but stay puffed (while you cook the rest or if you wish to rewarm them) in a 300 degree oven. And since this is one of the first recipes I worked on with a full apartment of noise vs. the relative peace of my Before work life — when I’d work on things throughout the afternoon and share at dinner — I had a lot of live commentary like “These are good!” And “I want more!” and “Wow, so puffy!” And “When are going to make them again?” Thus, you could call this a pre-approved recipe. I can’t wait to see how yours come out.
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