When Nate isn’t around, it’s kitchen experiment time. I make things like butternut squash/sweet potato/peanut butter mushy delicious (like a curry, but totally just made up) and of course need flatbread to go with it. I didn’t record the recipe as I made it, so this is going to be a bit like getting a recipe from my grandmother, but here goes anyway.
3 heaping 1/3 cup measures of whole wheat flour
some yeast (maybe a teaspoon or two?)
a heaping spoon of sugar (like a big soup spoon, but not a giant serving spoon and not a little cereal spoon)
water (I’m guessing about 3/4 of a cup. Enough to make the dough doughy)
a sprinkle of salt (I used large seasalt, not tiny little salt crystals and took I think one big, three to four finger sprinkle)
fresh ground pepper (about a minute of grinding)
some olive oil
So now that the ingredients list is all cleared up, here’s what I did.
1. Put the yeast in a bowl with the sugar & water (usually you use water between 105-115 F to activate the yeast, but I had no patience for that and just got it straight from the tap. Well, from the water filter next to the tap). Mix them all around and wait until impatience gets you and then move to step 2.
2. Dump the flour in. Then the salt (don’t want to kill our yeast) and pepper. Mix it all up to make it doughy. I use my hands, but I guess you could be fancy with a mixer or something. I think that might be overkill for the amount of dough we’re making.
3. Form the dough into a ball so you can pick it up while you put some olive oil into the bowl (be sure to get all the doughy bits off the bowl sides before you put in the olive oil).
4. Rub the dough-ball around in the olive oil coating the bowl & the dough.
5. Leave the dough-ball in the bowl for a while. Hours I think. I got distracted by Cracked.com all evening so time lost it’s meaning. I put the dough into the oven with the light on to help it rise. When it wasn’t rising fast enough, I turned the oven to 170 F until it preheated then turned it off.
6. Lose patience and determine it’s risen “enough” (we are making flatbread here). Take the dough-ball bowl out of the oven. Preheat the oven to 400 F while you break the dough into sections & shape them and put them on a grease cookie sheet (I greased with more olive oil). I did 5 “loaves” and made them somewhat pancake shaped. I would show you exactly what they looked like, but I ate them before I got the camera out. Visually they look like dense pancakes BUT THEY TASTE NOTHING LIKE PANCAKES SO DON’T CONFUSE YOUR TASTEBUDS THINKING MMMM…. PANCAKES.
7. Bake for 10 minutes at 400 F.
8. Eat them ALL!!!! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
