Sunday, November 20, 2011

Cooking with Amy: Naan Edition

I had another Breadventure this weekend.  I came across a simple recipe for naan (pronounced: naan).* The secret ingredient to the naan was yogurt.  Greek yogurt in an Indian bread.  Hmm.


I mixed the water, yeast and sugar and waited for it to get all foamy.  But it didn't.  So I dumped it down the sink and started again.  I assumed (incorrectly) that I used water that was too hot and killed the yeast. Well...my second go around yielded the same results.  No foam.


But I forged ahead anyways.  I mixed the rest of the ingredients but left out this flour:


for obvious reasons and got to kneading.  Well it looked like dough.  I set it aside and an hour later it still looked like this:


the yeast did not do its thing thus my dough didn't rise.  But I cooked it anyways.  At first the dough bubbled up like it was supposed to:


But when I flipped it, the bubbles sank and my bread turned out more like a tortilla pancake then a naan.



I probably went wrong in many ways but I am going to blame the yeast this time.  At least they kind of looked like naan.



I threw some crock pot bbq chicken on top and a few fresh mozzarella bits and made myself a little pizza.  It was delicious.  Even on a pancake-naan.



* I know that the letter A in the word cat is a short vowel...and the letter A in the word same is a long vowel...but what about when the letter A makes the sound that it does in naan, or at the end of Santa?  Long or short?  Is there a medium vowel? 

File under: #Things I should know as a second grade teacher paraprofessional.

   

4 comments:

  1. Nerdy teacher alert: When a vowel in an unstressed syllable makes the "uh" sound, it is called the schwa sound. I don't think naan necessarily falls into that category however as it is from another language and has a double a, but now you know! ;-)

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  2. Definitely your yeast. Next time, just give it more time to get activated. Sometimes that'll do the trick!

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  3. Naan is a nasalized a. Doesn't really have a long/short counterpart. In some eastern european languages (like Estonian) it's called a half-long vowel.

    And more info on the schwa: http://www.dwcummings.com/cbs/CBS%20320%20te.pdf

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