Saturday, March 17, 2018

Flatbread--First Experiment

Today, I attempted to make some flatbread to go with a meal of ful medames (Near Eastern stewed, spiced beans) that I was making for myself and my husband.  

I used ordinary all-purpose wheat flour because this wasn't a Viking meal and because I wanted to work with something familiar, since we were long-overdue for lunch and I was hungry.  The only respect in which I did not comply with Chef John's instructions is that I only let the dough rest for about five minutes before attempting to roll it out.

The end result?  Rolling the dough out turned out to be very challenging because it was stickier than the "slightly sticky" test led me to believe at first; I had to keep sprinkling flour on it to make it rollable and keep it from sticking to the mini-rolling pin I was using for the purpose. Also, though I was able to roll the dough out very thin (approximately a millimeter) I couldn't cook it that way because it would rip as I transferred it to the hot skillet.  The resulting bread was rather flavorless (but then, so are sandwich wraps) but had reasonable texture.  It was tasty enough, however, when wrapped around a hunk of ful (stewed fava beans).  

My husband pronounced the result a successful proof of concept, and said he was all for further flatbread experiments.  

Next time, I will schedule things so that I can let the dough rest for an hour in advance.  I may also try a different flour; possibly corn flour if not barley flour.  I will also try to get pictures of my next experiment.

EDIT: (3/17/2018) Link to my original post on Chef John provided at a reader's request.

4 comments:

  1. Hi.
    For ful medames you might want to try my ancient Egyptian recipes for unleavened flat bread.

    http://www.ancientrecipes.org/recipes/biblical-emmer-wheat-matzah/
    http://www.ancientrecipes.org/recipes/biblical-einkorn-wheat-passover-rekik-matzah/

    Regards
    Eli

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    Replies
    1. Thanks for the URLs! It is clearly the same technique I described, but using the ancient grains likely provides better flavor. If I can obtain emmer or einkorn flour, I will try your recipes and post about them here.

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  2. Cool. Thanks. You can buy good quality flour from Blue Bird Grain Farms.
    https://bluebirdgrainfarms.com

    ReplyDelete