There's nothing quite like a naan bread from a curry house as they're cooked fresh in a tandoor oven. In the restaurant the naan is cooked by sticking it to the side of the clay oven and cooked traditionally over charcoal although a lot of restaurants power them with gas now. It's then eased off the side and basted with ghee.
So why not use your Egg with the baking stone as a substitute tandoor?
This is exactly what I did and I have to say the naan was lovely, really lovely.
This recipe is for a plain naan dough, I'll add variants for other styles of naan as I try them.
To go with you naan's and make best use of having fired up your Egg why not cook Parmjit's Chicken Tikka first and then take it and add it to a curry sauce such as the masala sauce I do.
My dough proved so well it made a huge dome of the cling film.
Ingredients
- 900g plain white flour
- 50g fresh yeast (or 15g of fast acting instant yeast)
- 2 Tablespoons sugar
- Just under 1 Tablespoon salt
- 2 Tablespoons baking powder
- 300ml milk
- 300ml plain greek yogurt
- 3 eggs
- 3 Tablespoons melted butter or ghee
Method
- Warm the milk to a hand hot temperature and add the sugar, salt and yeast. Allow to sit for 20 mins, the yeast will start to foam.
- Place all of the other ingredients into a mixing bowl.
- Pour the milk into the bowl and bring together a sticky dough.
- Knead the dough for 10 minutes. This dough should be really sticky so don't worry about that.
- Place in a large bowl and cover with cling film. The dough will rise two or three times so you need a big bowl. Leave to rise for 2 to 24 hours.
- Take a ball of the dough and stretch out to a naan shape (teardrop shape).
- Pop it onto the baking stone of your Big Green Egg and cook at 250C or more for about 3 minutes. If you want to brown the bubbled side more just flip it over for and extra minute.
- Once out of the oven apply ghee sparingly to the top of the naan.
- Serve with a lovely curry.
Big Green Egg Setup
The easiest is to cook your chicken tikka over a direct heat on either a stainless steel grid or the cast iron grid. Once these are done, place your baking stone directly onto either grid and close you Big Green Egg. Allow the Egg to get to at least 250C and then allow 10 mins for the stone to heat through. Now you can add your naan.
For ideas on curry sauces why not take a look at the recipes and cooks from The Curry Guy, he's spent a couple of years eating nothing but curry researching recipes for his eBooks.