One More Use for Nutritional Yeast - the Easiest Garlic Naan Ever!

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This is a special yeasted dough, that takes 15min from start to finish. How's that possible, you might wonder. The answer: I'm using dead yeast. Before you click away, I'm not trolling. Deactivated yeast is actually a very potent dough relaxer. Of course the dead yeast can't breath out CO2 for the rise. This flatbread gets its rise from an acid-base reaction, similar to an Irish soda bread. The use of yogurt and baking soda is traditional for naan. The yeast is just here to work the dough for us. 

The functional ingredient here is glutathione, which will facilitate gluten relaxation. If you don't have a stand mixer and had made bread or noodles by hand in the past, you might've seen many instructions that tell you to rest the dough for an hour or two. That is to give the gluten time to loosen up. This will allow you to easily stretch the dough very thin with little effort, and no bounce-backs. Think hand-pulled-noodles or filo pastry. Deactivated yeast speeds up this process.

Nutritional yeast is a type of deactivated yeast, that had been a health fad for long time. If you have a vegan friend you've heard of it.They are easily accessible in grocery stores, and have a mildly parmesan-like flavor that makes them a popular topping on popcorns or even broccoli. Unfortunately those are tough sells at my household. But bread isn't! This naan couldn't have been easier. The dough really boils down to 2 main ingredients in equal weight: greek yogurt, and self-rising flour. Plus two minor add-ons to improve texture.  

This quick naan should taste somewhat like a cross between the Stonefire naan dippers you'd get from Costco, and the frozen garlic naan you'd get from Trader Joe's (except fresh!) If you read through the ingredients of commercial naan, you might find that inactive yeast is often included in the ingredient list as well. If you like your flatbread more chewy, try make your own self-rising flour with bread flour and baking powder (see recipe below).

If you don't have nutritional yeast and aren't curious about them as a food product, feel free to 'deactivate' good old baking yeast - just heat them until they're dead. 10 seconds or more at 167°F (75°C) is generally enough to do the job. So toast them, nuke them, pour boiling water over them. 

Let's start cooking before this gets weird.

Ingredients:

for the dough:

  • 1 cup self-rising flour (~120g) *
  • 1/2 cup greek yogurt (~120g)
  • 1/4 tsp baking soda
  • 1/4 tsp nutritional yeast

garlic butter:

  • 4tbsp butter (~60g) 
  • 2 cloves garlic, crushed

toppings:

  • chopped cilantro
  • sea salt flakes

 * if you don't have self-rising flour, use:

  • 1 cup all purpose flour (or bread flour)
  • 1/2 tbsp baking powder (not baking soda)
  • 1/2 tsp salt

Instruction:

  1. Add baking soda and nutritional yeast to the yogurt; mix until dissolved. 
  2. Add flour to the mixture, stir until big lumps forms. 
  3. Flour your hand, and form a dough with your hand. add flour as needed if dough is sticky. 
  4. Cover the dough and rest for 5 minutes while you make the garlic butter.
  5. Heat butter and garlic until butter is melted and garlic is fragrant. 
  6. Cut dough in quarters. generously flour each quarter, and roll each quarter out into 1/8 inch thin sheets. 
  7. Cook each sheet on a hot pan over medium heat until big bubbles form and crust is well browned; flip and cook until the other side is well browned. 
  8. Brush with garlic butter, top with cilantro and salt flakes. Enjoy! 

See my YouTube Channel for step-by-step video instructions! 


 



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