Lavash Crackers: Naan What I Expected

Alright, this week there are hardly any pictures. We were at Bill's parents' this weekend, so I didn't want to make anything too complicated and messy. It turns out that even easier than this "bread" stuff I've been making are crackers. Yes, instead of these crazy two day recipes or having to get up at 5:00 AM to make breakfast, I churned out a batch of crackers in two hours flat.

These particular crackers, lavash crackers, are actually more like a flatbread originating in Armenia. It is the most commonly made bread of many Middle Eastern countries, and undergoes a short life as a tortilla-like bread before drying out and becoming brittle. The traditional way to make lavash is incredibly similar to how naan is made in India. The dough is rolled out and slapped onto the inside wall of a tandoor, a cylindrical clay oven used throughout that region of the world that reaches insanely high temperatures around 900 degrees. The bread is then fished out before falling into the coals.

This particular recipe was intended to skip the tortilla stage and head directly to cracker mode. My first batch turned out very well, but my second batch didn't roll out as thin and turned out more like the aforementioned naan. They were both wonderful, however, and I will certainly be making these in the future, probably the next time I make hummus, as they would be the perfect dipper.

The crackers are pretty standard fare: flour, salt, yeast, honey, vegetable oil and water. After I scooped out half the ingredients, we realized the house was fresh out of honey. We took an emergency trip to the Amish store down the road and picked up fresh honey and some pumpernickel flour so I can start my sourdough revolution in a few weeks. That place seriously had every kind of flour I needed. Unfortunately, we haven't found a place around here yet that sells pumpernickel flour, high-gluten flour or a few of the other specialty flours needed for a few of these recipes. I'll probably be buying in bulk the next time we go up.

The ingredients came together without any fuss and formed a very nondescript, incredibly dense ball. This was set to rise for ninety minutes, after which it had expanded and was as much of a dream to work with as the risen dough for the cinnamon buns were the previous week. I worked to roll the dough out to be "paper-thin". Unfortunately, the only paper I could compare its thickness to would be cardboard. Oh, well! As I'm learning from Julia Child, I can call it perfect, no matter how it turned out.

At this point, I cut it into a roughly square shape and added toppings. Traditionally, only poppy seeds or sesame seeds are added, but Reinhart gave several wonderful suggestions that we tried out. On this batch, from top to bottom, were sesame seeds, caraway seeds (also fresh from the Amish store), sea salt, paprika and rosemary. Reinhart said to spray the dough with water and simply add the toppings. Unfortunately, the only things that stuck after the baking were the salt and paprika. I'm not sure where it went wrong, but everything else simply rolled off.

We had already gotten started on the crackers before I remembered to take a picture, but here they are! The odd black shapes on the right side are the poppy seeds gathered around the areas that puffed up on the second batch.

My crackers look absolutely nothing like the picture in the book, but we really enjoyed them anyway (the plate was quickly empty, at least). We grilled some cheese to put on top of the crackers, and they were a perfect combination. I really enjoyed having both the crunchy and the chewy versions, and the ones with the sea salt were especially good, providing a great bitter flavor on top of the slight sweetness of the honey in the crackers.

Lavash crackers? Check.

Next up? Cornbread.