Mumbai, India. Kastamonu, Turkey.

It is an interesting coincidence that I am currently reading a book about India and the recipe for TWD this week is Oasis Naan. The book I am reading, Behind the Beautiful Forevers,  is a journalistic account of  life in the slums of Mumbai. Needless to say, it is full of angering and heartbreaking stories about bad politics, corruption, and a long list of other pathologies of underdevelopment. As I was baking this recipe, I could not stop thinking about the characters in the book and imagining the women of the book making similar flatbreads in their  poor kitchens.

I love naan bread. However,  I only have it if I eat out at an Indian restaurant, which I don’t tend to do often. Apparently, naan is common in many other South and Central Asian countries and also  in Middle East. I did not know this. I read it online as I was baking the bread.  Anyway,  the version of naan I tried at restaurants have typically been rather thin, soft, garlicky (yumm) and  buttery. The version I baked for TWD is actually quite different. It has a harder golden crust and is chewy with little air holes inside.

Baking this bread was a breeze. I used very few ingredients and kitchen tools. To make the dough I first mixed warm water, yeast and flour in a large bowl with a spoon. Once the dough came together, I  knead it for 10 minutes by hand on the countertop. I love feeling the texture of a soft sticky dough ball in my hands. After the kneading, I let the dough rise for 2 hours. Then I heated the oven to 500F, split the dough into 4 pieces and rolled out each piece into a small 1/4inch thick circle. To prevent the rolled out dough from rising in the oven, I poked a ton of holes on each piece with a fork. I sprinkled some water and coarse salt on them. Then I topped one of the pieces with a mixture of  fresh thyme from the garden, green olives and black olives. The second piece only had caraway seeds. The third one was sprinkled with sesame seeds. Finally, the fourth one was topped with garlic and fresh rosemary from the garden.  I baked each piece of bread in the oven for about  6 minutes. Like I said, it is super simple.

You can find the recipe here and here.

It was quite late at night when I finished the recipe. So, David and I took a little taste of the sesame one with some Turkish goat cheese. We both loved this bread very much. It is not similar to naan bread I had at Indian restaurants but it is very tasty and would go excellently with hummus or other similar spreads. It reminded me of a type of bread we have in Turkey, called Ramazan Pidesi (Ramadan Pita),  a flatbread we could only find in bakeries during the holy month of Ramadan when I was growing up. In Kastamonu,  a small Blacksea city we lived in for a while,  the neighborhood bakery was right across our apartment. During the Ramadan the baker would “custom bake” pide for anyone who brought their own sesame seeds and egg. You know, if you bring your own ingredients, he has less incentives to skimp on them, thus you get a better bread :).  My mom would hand me an egg and a bowl of sesame seeds and send me to wait in line with the other neighborhood kids in front of the bakery. A long line of kids with eggs and sesame seeds. All waiting to bring home the freshest possible pide for the breaking of the day-long fast. As I pulled the steaming hot naan breads out of the oven tonight, I could not help but remember how my hands would burn with the heat of the pide wrapped in an old newspaper I used to carry home as a kid.

Oasis Naan