Naansense

It's summer, which in Chicago means heat and humindity -- hardly bread baking weather. Still I do love bread and since we had soup for dinner tonight, I decided to look up a recipe for grilled bread. I found a promising looking one for naan and decided to give it a go.

The dough is fairly straightforward. There's no real fancy work or a pre-ferment so I was able to do it the day I decided to take it on, which is nice. It is a very soft (wet) dough though, so it might be a bit of a test of patience when kneading and shaping. I found that for the shaping into portions, I was much happier if I kept my fingertips oiled and kept the dough moving a lot.

After the first rise, you punch the dough down and knead in garlic until it's distributed. I used green garlic from the CSA, which had a pretty mild flavor. Next time I'll be more careful to get it evenly distributed: As it was, I ended up with some pieces having very little garlic and some having a lot.

The dough is then divided into golf ball sized pieces, shaped into balls, and risen again.
Once the grill is hot, you stretch the dough balls and place them right on the grill. The recipe doesn't specify how thin the dough should end up, and I started with some pretty thick pieces. With practice I found that the thinner you can stretch it, the better. If you can see the gluten, toss those suckers on the grill. The dough does not stick as it would to the side of an oven (where the bread is usually baked) so it does contract a bit in the cooking.
Once the first side is done (which only takes a few minutes, depending on the heat of the grill) you brush the naan with melted butter (ghee would probably be more traditional, but plain ole melted, unclarified butter worked great too) and flip them over. They puffed up a lot during the cooking on the first side, even when they had been stretched extremely thinly during the shaping. At this point, you brush the just cooked side with butter as well. Mmmmm...so much butter.
The recipe made quite a bit, but it was so good that volume was not a problem. The 'loaves' were not huge, and were amazingly delicious. Of the twelve pieces that came off the grill, seven were eaten within a few hours.
The resulting crumb for the bread was very nice. The puffed up parts had nice large holes, and the bread was pleasantly chewy throughout. The early loaves that I had not stretched as thinly were very slightly undercooked, but even those were excellent and not at all doughy. In reality, the dough seemed very forgiving of cooking time and temperature, and loaves ranging from very lightly colored to deeply browned were all wonderfully textured and endowed with great flavor. I had been concerned that the melted butter brushed on the done side of the bread might make it greasey, but it didn't.

Overall, this was an excellent recipe and one that we will certainly add to our normal rotation. Being able to cook the bread on the grill rather then baking it in the oven makes it a great summer option, and the quality of the resultant bread means you really aren't missing anything by going that route.

Update: Yesterday I read some of the comments on allrecipes for the original recipe, and it seemed like some folks had complained about the toughness of the bread. I realized that while I had measured out the full amount of flour, I used way less than it called for. This lead to a much softer dough, which probably explains the difference. It makes it a little harder to knead and shape, but I would certainly repeat this decision, based on the quality of the final bread.