Thank you Dan, I am going to try the things you have suggested and get back to you. I think you may have hit the nail on the head about flour. Indian plain flour is probably higher in Gluten than the UK one and rises pretty fast! I did not know that too much yeast can make the dough heavy, but now that you mention it, it makes sense, rising and falling too fast? I did not know about the raw milk either. You see, milk is always boiled before consumption in India, even if it is pasteurized.
I make mine in an old pan these days, it is hardly worth heating an oven for just the two of us and it never gets hot enough for good naans anyway. Many people in India cook it over an upturned wok or have a gas top tandoor.
I have your book ‘The Handmade Loaf’ and I try various recipes from it regularly. Sour dough bread has eluded me so far, having tried many recipes over the last couple of years. The best I have eaten was in San Francisco and it is my dream to get it right. May be I will buy their ‘starter’ flakes one day and cheat a bit
!
Dom, hope your chapatties come out nice. They are quite easy to make once you get the hang of rolling them out.
Pab, I do make my naan dough in a beard machine these days, much easier than kneading by hand!
Shooz, chapatti flour is not strong flour. It is plain wheat flour. It comes in different grade. The one most commonly used flour for chapatties and parathas etc. is number 2 or medium chapatti flour, which has some bran removed from it. In India, people (including my mum) used to buy wheat, wash/dry it and then send it to the flour mill for grinding. She still does it, though most people now buy milled flour. When I am in a country where they don’t have chapatti flour, I make chapatties by mixing whole meal and white flour , but never strong flour. Chapatties are flat breads and do not need high gluten to rise.
Mamta
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