Homemade No Yeast Garlic Butter Naan Recipe | ChefDeHome.com (2024)

FAQs

Do Indian restaurants use yeast in naan? ›

About Naan

In the modern days, yeast & other leavening agents have replaced the bread starter. So most restaurants either use yeast or another leavening agent like baking powder & baking soda. If you order naan in Indian restaurants you may not find the texture & flavor to be the same in every place.

Baking Soda

It helps breads rise and gives them their light and airy texture. Unlike yeast, baking soda needs an acid to activate it. By adding an acid to baking soda (such as lemon juice or cream of tartar) a chemical reaction occurs that produces carbon dioxide and fills your bread with air — much like yeast does.

Whereas a chapati is quite flat, and paratha is layered, naan is made up of one fluffy layer, probably more similar to a pita bread than a chapati. It gets this fluffiness from the presence of some sort of leavening agent. Traditionally this would have been yeast.

My favorite homemade naan recipe is made with basic bread ingredients (flour, water and yeast) plus a generous dollop of yogurt, egg and baking powder to make the bread extra soft and chewy. I also prefer to use touch of honey as a natural sweetener for the bread.

Afghan naan is different in shape, texture, and taste from Indian varieties. While the main ingredient – wheat flour – is the same, Afghan bakers hand-shape the dough, rather than rolling it out, and their use of a tandoor results in large, pillowy rounds.

From health perspective, flat breads made of whole wheat flour (roti/paratha/chapati/phulka) are better than the ones made with all-purpose flour (naan & kulcha).

Unleavened bread, or bread without yeast, is a typical Jewish food, the name derives from the Greek azymos (without yeast) which in Jewish becomes mazzah, and it is the symbol of the Passover that recalls the Exodus from Egypt: it was the bread of the fugitives because it was quickly prepared by the fleeing Jews.

For health conscious consumers yeast free bread has many benefits and is recommended for people suffering from Diabetes, Candida and other digestive problems. Eating most types of regular bread creates sugar in our body's when our body breaks down the bread into carbohydrates and simple sugars.

Skip: Naan

And like those fluffy spuds, this soft flatbread has little nutritional value. Most naan recipes call for Greek yogurt to give it that airy texture. But that's more than offset by less healthy ingredients like white flour, sugar, and oil.

What are the disadvantages of naan bread? ›

As such, you should avoid filling up on naan if you're watching your saturated fat intake. Moreover, store-bought plain naan has a relatively high sodium content, accounting for around 18% of the DV. Eating too much sodium may increase blood pressure and your risk for heart disease and stroke ( 7 ).

Naan is similar to other baked flatbreads but has a few distinguishing characteristics. Naan is enriched with ingredients like yogurt, milk, and eggs, while pita uses water to moisten its dough, making naan the softer bread.

You sprinkle water to keep the naan bread soft. Naan bread will naturally stiffen when not eaten straight from the pan, so eat it as soon as you possibly can.

Yogurt: Plain Greek yogurt holds the naan dough together and ensures a tender texture. Make sure you get authentic Greek yogurt and not Greek-style yogurt.

In Indonesia, naan is popular in Indian Indonesian and Arab Indonesian communities as well as in Malay, Acehnese and Minangkabau communities–with other variants of roti like roti canai. This dish is usually locally known as roti naan or roti nan and cooked using Indonesian spices, such as garlic with a local taste.

Naan is essentially a leavened flatbread, which means it contains some form of raising agent to provide its airy texture. Hence for this naan, the raising agent we will be using is yeast. Other variations do exist which may utilise self raising flour or baking powder/baking soda.

A colossal diversity of enzyme- and alcohol-producing yeasts under the phylum Ascomycota has been reported from Indian fermented foods and alcoholic beverages. The distributions of yeast species show 13.5% of Saccharomyces cerevisiae and 86.5% of some non-Saccharomyces spp.

It's called Irish Soda Bread because it's made with baking soda instead of yeast. Because of this, it's more dense than your everyday white sandwich bread. Hearty and rustic are the words that come to mind, and it tastes kind of nutty from the wholemeal flour.

These breads range from a simple Tandoori roti which is unleavened bread, to yeast-based khamiri roti, as well as richer and more complex (yeast, milk, egg, etc. -based) naans and kulcha breads.