The Babes are certainly an adventurous group of bread bakers. Take the August challenge, for example. This recipe required a trip to the hardware store/garden center to purchase a container of rocks. One more baking tool in the Babes’ arsenal.
Elizabeth, of Blog from OUR Kitchen, was the Kitchen of the Month for August, and she was excited to have everyone bake Naan Sangak, or Persian Pebble Bread.
This is a basic naan flatbread that is baked on a bed of very hot stones in either the oven, or on a grill.
The dough can be leavened with either yeast or sourdough starter. I opted for the yeast version and used a recipe by Yotam Ottolenghi from Master Class. It was a great dough to work with and baked up nicely.
However, contrary to common knowledge, the bread did not release from the stones after baking. There were a few stones that clung to the bread for dear life, having to be pried from the underside of the naan, but this baker was victorious in removing them.
This was a flavorful bread, easy to prepare, and fun to bake and eat, especially with the toasted nigella seeds on top.
If you visit Elizabeth’s blog, you can find the detailed recipe and a lovely story behind this interesting bread. Then, head out to your local garden store for some smooth stones, and have a good time baking along with us. Send Elizabeth your story by the 29th to be included in the roundup and get a Buddy Badge for Naan Sangak.
Check out the other Bread Baking Babes to see their pebble bread:
- Blog from OUR Kitchen – Elizabeth (Kitchen of the Month)
- Karen’s Kitchen Stories – Karen
- A Messy Kitchen – Kelly
- My Diverse Kitchen – Aparna
- Bread Experience – Cathy
- Thyme for Cooking - Katie
- My Kitchen in Half Cups – Tanna
- Feeding My Enthusiasms – Elle
6 comments:
The rocks stuck to my bread too! I'm jealous of your river rocks!
Oh yes, love your river pebbles! Even if they had to be prised off the bread. We liked the nigella seeds as well, such good flavor.
Your photos make it look so easy! Lovely bake! I do like the photo of the rocks sticking to the bread. Mine did the same thing.
Gorgeous rocks! Lovely bread.
My rocks all stuck to the bread; when I used semolina on the sheet pan to slide the dough off, only one rock stuck to the bread.
Your river rocks look very similar to the river rocks we bought. Except yours are all a beautiful uniform black colour. And your bread is beautiful!
Ha! I think that every time we make this bread, every single one of our rocks stick fast to the bread. It's quite an adventure prying them off. We have found that if we let the bread rest a bit after turning it over, the stones release more easily.
We haven't tried Tanna's method of using semolina on the sheet pan for sliding the dough off yet. Just one rock stuck, Tanna? How amazing!
Oops... I knew I'd forget to add something. Apparently, in Iran, in the older bakeries that still use separate stones, instead of stones that have been cemented onto the bottom of their sangak ovens, people often take home bread that has one or two stones still attached.
And look what I found on the internet library (wayback machine):
The oven itself is simply a hollow scooped in the earth and lined on the sides with pebbles, which absorb the heat and bake the giant flap-jack. but impart to the bread a peculiar pitted appearance and often a gritty taste. We can well understand why this bread is called 'pebble-bread' (nãn-i sangak).) [A.V. Williams Jackson, Persia Past and Present: a book of travel and research (1906), p.46]
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