Stove-top Flatbreads

This recipe comes from River Cottage Every Day, like a couple of others on this blog. I love it because it is fun and extremely easy/fast. We had it with Indian food the other day, and it served admirably in place of naan. Extra bonus points for being something we can literally throw on top of the wood stove when it's heating the house anyway.

Ingredients
[makes 8 individual flatbreads]
1 3/4 cups flour
1 tsp salt
1 Tbsp canola/vegetable oil
2/3 cup warm water

Procedure
Lightly flour your counter/cutting board/whatever. Combine salt and flour in a bowl. In a separate container, add the oil to the warm water. Pour the oily water into the flour in a thin stream, mixing it in as your pour, until the mixture is a more or less homogeneous dough.

Knead the dough with your hands on your floured work surface for about 5 minutes. (You can use the dough hook on your KitchenAid or whatnot instead, but that's not nearly as fun. And probably won't save you any time or effort when you factor in the extra dish washing.)

It will feel pretty elastic after 5 minutes. Let it rest underneath the overturned bowl for about 15 minutes.

This bread will be much, much better hot, so don't cook it until you're ready to eat. (The rolling process will take about 5-10 minutes and the actual cooking process will take about 2.) When you're about ready to eat, roll the dough into a long sausage and divide it into 8 equal pieces. Keeping the surface pretty floured, roll each piece into a ball with your hands and then roll it out with a rolling pin into a circle (more or less) about 1/8" thick. If they're a bit thicker, that's okay too -- you'll have a slightly chewier bread.










(Note that if you aren't going to be cooking all of the pieces, you can freeze them after you roll them out. For more on that, see the bit about storage, below.)







If you have a woodstove going nice and hot, wipe that clean. If you're not so lucky, heat a cast-iron pan quite hot, then turn the heat down a bit. Ready a plate lined with either a clean tea towel or a double layer of paper towel.

Shake off excess flour and toss the bread onto the pan/stove. After about 2-3 minutes, the dough will start to look a bit hard (or "set" as Fearnly-Whittingstall calls it) on top. Flip the bread over. If it doesn't have nice golden brown patches, flip it back over and give it another 30 or so seconds and try again. (Do not exceed 3-4 minutes though.) Cook it another 45 seconds on this side, and then place it between the towels on your plate to keep it warm and soft.

Eat immediately!


Storage
You can store uncooked dough in the freezer for a long time. To store it, roll out fresh dough and place on a piece of wax paper. Layer however many breads you want to store in between pieces of wax paper and place them in a plastic bag.

Recycling
As Fearnley-Whittingstall points out in the book, if you do end up with some unused and already cooked breads, they won't be that great once they cool. But you can turn them into crackers by brushing them with some herbs/spices and oil, tearing them into smaller pieces, and heating them in the oven at 425F until they get crispy to your liking. Breads brushed with oil mixed with some oregano go well with Mediterranean dishes (like a side for a Greek salad or some stuffed grape leaves).