Brown Kitchen: An Indian-style pizza, with a twist.
Before I took the leap into the food world, I went to school to study microbial genetics. Yet I’ve always been wary of sourdough cultures. The reason, I now realize, was paradoxical: It seemed too easy and too difficult at the same time.
I had heard from several friends who had experimented with baking bread that creating the sourdough starter was actually the easiest part. The rest, however, was trickier: getting the bread to rise, getting the right texture inside the bread and keeping the starter alive. Eventually, with a little coaxing and a lot of envy after tasting all the beautiful loaves at Tartine and the Mill, I decided I needed to start somewhere — and somewhere simple. And the best place to start is with flatbread, which is a lot more forgiving.
This is how my sourdough naan pizza was born.
At first, naan might seem like an odd choice for a pizza bread. It is one of the least frequent flatbreads you will encounter in an Indian home, even in its traditional region of the northern states of India.
In India, naan is rarely madeinside the home because ovens are not a common essential household appliance. The traditional tandoor has to be kept outdoors, and with the modern constraints of tight living spaces, this can become tricky. Traditionally, a damp cloth is used to slap the rolled-out bread onto the hot walls of the tandoor oven and allowed to cook until it rises and gets puffy and blistered. In India, naans are topped with ghee or butter, or garlic and a few spices, and even stuffed with ingredients from spicy Goan sausage to shredded paneer to mashed spiced potatoes.
Unlike Middle Eastern breads, naan is leavened using the live cultures in yogurt and eggs, which helps to create an airy and puffier bread, a perfect choice for a thincrust pizza. Other Indian breads like roti and paratha rely more on technique; like butter in croissants and biscuits, they are made by folding and sealing fats such as ghee or oil within layers of the rolled-out dough.
You can use this naan pizza base with any of your favorite toppings. Just remember: The key to a good thin-crust pizza is a high temperature. You can achieve this by using a grill and cooking the pizza directly on it, or use your oven and turn the dial up to 450 to 550 degrees for most home ovens. The use of a baking steel helps give that blistered, puffy effect because it mimics some of the conditions of how naan cooks in the tandoor oven.