Iranian flatbread / Taftun

Component of another meal - Vegetarian

It's like the Iranian version of naan bread. In some Iranian restaurants, they'll call it naan bread rather than taftun.

Cooking method: Pan fry
Serves: 2

Time: Long - longer than 60 minutes
Difficulty: Easy - a child could do it

Equipment

• Dough hooks
• Food mixer
• Frying pan
• Mixing bowl

Ingredients

• Condiment, cube, or tube
• Salt - 1 teaspoon
• Eggs / cheese / dairy
• Milk - 100 ml
• Yoghourt - 100 ml
• Flour / sugar / baking
• Yeast (dried) - 1
• Sugar - 2 teaspoon
• Flour (plain) - 250 gm
• Oil
• Olive - 1 tablespoon

Method

Put your oil and salt in the bottom of the mixing bowl. This is important, because the salt needs to initially be buried by everything else. Add the flour, and the sugar, and the yeast. Heat up the yoghourt and milk together to a temperature of tepid, and add it to the bowl.

With your food mixer with the dough hooks in, mix all that up together on the fastest setting for about a minute, then turn the mixer down to the slowest setting and kneed for about 10 minutes. Put the bowl with the resulting dough aside somewhere warm for about an hour or two to rise. Some people say cover - I've myself never seen what difference covering my dough makes.

Time passes, and heat up the biggest flattest frying pan (no oil) you have on the hob on high, and then bring the setting down to medium. Take a big blob of dough off, roll it into a ball and flatten it out, pulling it apart with your hands until you can get the piece as thin as it can be, and then try getting it thinner - don't worry if you pull some holes in it, that adds to the rustic authenticity. Put the flattened piece of dough into your frying pan. Cook for a couple of minutes until there are some nice brown spots all over it, and turn it over to cook the other side. Whilst it's cooking the other side, take off another blob of dough and stretch that out ready to put in the pan. Be careful not to let your pan burn whilst this is going on.

Repeat until all the dough is done, and you may want to rewarm it all in the microwave before serving. Or it may all still be warm enough without needing to heat it up again.