April 22 – Curried Flatbread

I’ve only been doing this Bittman project for one month, and I can't believe I’m already behind.... I don’t really have a good excuse - this flatbread recipe was VERY easy, but there just wasn’t a time in the past week and a half when I was cooking and had an hour to let it bake in the oven. Well, tonight my husband wanted to make a very simple spinach-chick pea curry dish that we like. We usually have a bit of pita on the side, but I realized that the curried flatbread would be a nice stand-in…and it was a Sunday, so there was no excuse about the baking time.

I did not make the “fancy” Curried Cauliflower Flatbread that Bittman featured in the Finessing Flatbread article. My husband is not a big fan of cauliflower, and we already had quite a few veggies in the main dish. So I decided to make the simple flatbread that was described at the beginning of the article:

1 cup whole wheat flour
about 1 1/4 cups water
a large pinch of salt

After preheating the oven to 400 degrees and getting out the mixing bowl, I realized we only had about a tablespoon of whole wheat flour left. While I had an hour to cook the bread, I didn't have extra time to run to the grocery store for whole wheat flour and still have dinner at a decent hour. So I liberally applied his advice about about mixing up the flour base and used a 50-50 mix of all purpose flour and cornmeal. I also added about a teaspoon of curry powder to the batter as well, keeping with the theme of our main dish. I then just mixed everything together into a thin batter.

I added a couple of tablespoons of oil olive to my large skillet over medium-high heat. When the oil was hot, I followed a modification from the Bitten blog and added about a 1/3 cup of diced onions and let them fry up a bit. I then poured the batter on top of the onions and oil. There was a bit of a problem here, because the batter just pushed all the onions to the edge. I didn’t want to disturb the oil layer underneath and risk the flatbread sticking to the pan, so I just let it be. I then put the skillet in the oven and got on with our main dish. After 45 minutes, the flatbread was a light brown with nice crispy edges. I removed it and let it rest. Here’s what it looked like:



When I went to take it out of the pan, I found problem number 2 – the bread was stuck to the skillet in a few spots. I realized that I should have added more oil to the pan to compensate for the oil that the onions soaked up. I'll just have to remember that for next time. I just scraped between the bread and the pan with a spatula and it released...for the most part (about 2 silver dollar size pieces still stuck to the pan). I cut the circle of bread into 8 wedges and served it with our veggie curry.

It was a big success! The bread itself had a nice texture, the curry powder made it a great complement to our main course, and the crispy onion border was an added treat. It certainly beat out our usual pita side dish. I will definitely make this flatbread again, perhaps even trying the “fancy” roasted vegetable variation.