Gluten Free Flat Bread

Well a week has gone by but it was another successful Supper Club last Sunday. I can't really believe that it's Sunday again....or do I mean that I've only just hoovered the smooshed poppadom out the carpet? If you missed it the theme was Indian food.

Excuse the fuzzy photo and the lack of pictures of actual food. I wanted to get a picture of each dish that everyone bought and show off my friends culinary skills. That's easier said than done when you have 14 hungry people who are circling and the food is gone before you have chance to find your phone!!
We had Chicken Korma, Prawn Rogan Josh, Slow Cooked Lamb Coconut Curry, Bombay Aloo, Tandoori Chicken Skewers, Poppadoms, Mint Yogurt, Mango Chutney, Lime Pickle, a plethora of Samosa and Bhaji's, Naan Bread and Gluten Free Flat bread.

As I mentioned last time we have 3 gluten free chaps in our group and for them that rules out delicious naan bread. Some how we all managed to forget to cook a rice dish so it was a very good job that I decided to make this else they would have had the monopoly on all the poppadoms!

It's a bit of an amalgamation of different recipes I found through the internet. The only problem is that when you are searching people are trying to tick so many boxes and so half of them were gluten free and dairy free and fun free so sod them! I came up with this....

Ingredients
I used a combination of Gram Flour and Rice Flour. Gram flour is a fine yellow flour made from ground chick peas and is used in batters for onion bhajis and pakoras. Rice Flour is used a lot in oriental cooking and in the Southern Indian staple of Dosa where it is used to make a fermented batter that is cooked into very thin pancakes on a hot griddle. Because this is a gluten free recipe you need something to add the stickiness and stretch into the dough that gluten would normally provide I used Xanthan Gum. This is an no yeast recipe so there is no waiting around but it does have Baking Powder just to lighten it up. The Nigella Seeds (black onion seeds) help add that authentic naan bread taste. For the wet part of the mix I used Natural Yogurt and just a tablespoon of Milk to help loosen the dough. If you wanted to be boring or you are dairy free you could just use water.


Gluten Free Flat Bread

215g Gram Flour (plus extra for dusting)
140g Rice Flour
2 tsp Xanthan gum
2 tsp Baking powder
1tbsp Nigella seed
2tbsp Sugar
1 tsp Salt
250g Natural Yogurt
1 tbsp Milk
Optional - Red Chilli/Coriander

• Preheat oven to 150'c
• Combine all the ingredients in a bowl and mix to create a firm yet slightly sticky dough
• Dust work surface with gram flour and roll dough out in to a short fat sausage. Cut it in half and then each half into quarters so you have 8 equal pieces.

• Keep the work surface well dusted with gram flour and flatten out a piece of dough. At this point if you want to add coriander take about a table spoon of chopped coriander and place it in the centre of the dough. Fold it over so that it is sealed inside. Roll out the piece 2-3mm thick circle (or pear shape if you want it formed like a traditional naan) if you want to add chilli to the flat bread sprinkle the slices over and press into the dough at this point.

• Heat a large frying pan or griddle on a medium high heat and grease with vegetable oil. Wipe away excess with kitchen roll.
• Place the dough in the pan and cook for 2-3 minutes. You should see slight bubbles start to form and when you flip it it should have some dark spots. Cook it for another 1-2 minutes.

• Remove from pan and place on a baking tray. Repeat the process with the remaining 7 pieces of dough. Once they have all been placed on the tray pop them in the oven for around 5 minutes.
• Take out the oven and wrap in a clean tea towel. Serve straight away. 

And just in case you were wondering we weren't short on pudding we had indian sweets, ice cream and the Kulfi's!

As you may remember I made them in two different moulds - ice lollies and in a silicon muffin mould. The ice lollies definitely made for easy eating. A quick run of the mould under the warm tap and they came out. We ate them as they were partly down to the fact that I had forgotten to blitz some pistachios but also because we were so full from all the savoury goodies!

However just to prove how pretty they can look I made myself a fancy pants pudding with one of the left overs later in the week.