Keto Naan Bread

Insignificant as may seem but flatbread is crucial pillars of societies, keeping cultures alive and like keto naan bread introducing them to the future.

How far humanity has come since we first thought of throwing a moist blob of wheat flour onto a hot rock.

We have been using fire to prepare our food since Prometheus thought, it was a good idea giving it to the humans. Unfortunately the Gods, particularly his boss Zeus didn’t share his enthusiasm in the matter and their fall out brought inconvenient consequences to Prometheus.

History books are a little bit murky here, so humans likely used fire before that but in less ingenuine ways. Taming fire gave us previously unimaginable power over our environment and allowed us to feed an organ, that’s only 2% of the whole-body weight, yet consumes 20% of its whole energy needs.

However, our body wasn’t developed as a killing machine to grace the top of the food chain, we have still managed not only to survive but dominate our environment whenever the wind of life blew us.

Fire allowed humanity to leave its cradle and roam free in the world, untroubled by its harshness, as long as there’s a warm fireplace to go home to. Of course, there were a couple of competing spices for world domination that were even faster to leave the old continent than modern humans, but they didn’t stand a chance to our skills.

Cooking raw food not only gave us the edge in food safety but allowed us to consume ingredients that otherwise would be very hard to incorporate into everyday human diets. Wheat, corn, rice is all hardly edible raw, let alone enjoyable, yet these plants are the base human societies for millennials.

It took a couple of years to find out that toiling the Earth yields more than running around the fields gathering the nuts and seeds but making tasty meals came much earlier. However, potter was even longer way off than agriculture early humans found clever ways to cook their stew and bread.

Incredible as it may sound but cooking soups and stews without a slow cooker was a thing before making use of thunderbolts in form of electricity came to anyone’s mind. It seems that filling animal hides with water, makes them resistant enough to cook in them over open fire for a long time.

As animal hides were rarely in short supply, yet pottery was a long way forward early humans used what they had at hand to cook their dinner.

Although, making bread for the stews may sound like a much more complicated business, at the early day’s humans fussed much less about it than we do today with hyper complicated methods to bake the perfect traditional loaf.

Making bread at the open fire only required a fairly flat stone that could hold the dough until it developed a crackling crust and it was ready for the delight of the family.

This flatbread making method traveled with humans all over the world and ingrained itself into many nations culture in one way or the other. Its simplicity doesn’t really allow much variety to be developed yet there exists much more of this thing that many of us would even care to skim through: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatbread

The simplicity of the method means that we aren’t locked into certain routines or traditions that we need to follow in order to make the perfect thing. A perfect example of this is the Indian/ Asian naan bread.

The original naan bread if such thing indeed exist is a very basic wheat and yeast-based flatbread prepared on a region-specific oven called tandoori oven. When baking is done, it is typically brushed with butter, ghee or simply water and that’s about it, ready to be served with food on top or filled inside.

It may seem that our options to make a flatbread is being limited if we are in a low carb diet but in reality we are just going back to our roots. Making a naan bread keto, will require a few more ingredients to be added to our flour than just water and yeast, but it will not be more tedious than the original.

Afterall, if our ancestors with no KitchenAid could manage to dough a flatbread from nuts, husks and who knows what we certainly will be capable of doing it our cozy kitchens.

Ingredients:

Bread:

1½lb / 700g Almond flour
2 teaspoon Baking powder
6oz / 125g Yogurt
1 Egg
1 teaspoon Salt

Topping:

Butter
Parsley
Optional:
- Cilantro instead of parsley
- Garlic

How to make Keto naan bread in the oven:

Preheat the oven to 375°F / 180°C
Pour all the ingredients into a bowl.
Mix them together by hand. If it turns out to be too sticky place the bowl into the fridge for 15 minutes or so. It can be left there overnight as well if something unexpected happens.
Form egg sized balls then flatten them onto naan bread shapes by hand. It may be a good idea keep a glass of water close by and slightly watering our hands before handling the dough. Water will prevent it to stick down too much.
Place the naan bread onto a nonstick baking sheet or parchment paper.
Bake them until golden brown spots starts to appear on top for about 10 to 15 minutes. If our oven bakes unevenly mind to move the breads around around half time or turn the tray around.
Get a chunk of butter and apply it until the breads are hot.
Sprinkle some parsley or even better cilantro on top.

How to make Keto naan bread in a frying pan:

Heat the frying pan to medium to low and melt a chunk of butter or add frying oil.
Place the flattened out naan bread dough onto the melted butter.
On medium to low heat fry it for 3-5 minutes or until the bottom gets a lovely golden brown color and doesn’t stick to the pan. Mind not to start at a too high temperature as the bread can burn black sooner than it cooks trough and the whole thing falls apart.
Fry the other side as well for 3-5 minutes or as much as necessary. Add a bit more butter if necessary.
Don’t forget to apply butter and parsley or cilantro.