Britain and Ireland · Volume 37, South Asian and Caribbean Britain

Naan

Name: Naan
Total time: 2 h
Yield: Makes 6
Cuisine: The New British Table
Ingredients: 500 g strong white bread flour; 1 tsp fast-action dried yeast; 1 tsp sugar; 1 tsp salt; 150 g natural yoghurt; 150 ml warm water; 2 tbsp vegetable oil; as needed melted butter and crushed garlic, to finish

British curry house

Naan, tandoor charred flatbread finished with garlic butter: a large, irregular teardrop shaped flatbread with a pale golden surface and distinct dark charred blisters, a glossy sheen of melted garlic butter across the top.

Illustration

Time: 2 hours

Researched: 4 sources cited

Naan's spread through British curry houses tracks the tandoor's own arrival from 1968 onward; garlic naan is commonly served alongside balti specifically, though this chapter found no sourced claim that garlic naan itself was invented in Birmingham, and does not assert one.

by British curry house

Serious food writers doubt the Kashmiri framing entirely. Historian Colleen Taylor Sen has stated plainly that food in Baltistan, the region the dish's name may or may not actually reference, "bears no resemblance" to a Birmingham balti curry. Scholar Ziauddin Sardar called the whole invented lineage "a triumph of marketing" aimed squarely at white British customers, and Madhur Jaffrey, in 2014, dismissed it outright as "a craze with no authentic origins." Local balti historian Andy Munro offers the more useful, less romantic explanation: the inventor, whoever he was, "wanted to attract white Brummies and knew they would want quick service and meat off the bone, as opposed to the Pakistani custom" of cooking it on the bone. What is not in dispute is the mechanics: a thin, flat-bottomed pressed steel or carbon-steel pan, two flat handles, high heat, roughly ten minutes' cooking, vegetable oil rather than ghee, and no separate serving dish at all, the balti cooked and eaten from the same vessel, scooped up with naan rather than spooned over rice, in what one source calls "the Birmingham scoop." The pan itself is credited to a named Birmingham engineer, Santokh Singh, per a local housewares proprietor's own account. The Balti Triangle, Sparkbrook, Balsall Heath and the Moseley fringe, reportedly peaked at 30 to 40 balti houses in the 1990s, and is now, like the wider curry trade, in real decline, an unsuccessful bid for UK or EU protected-name status having gone nowhere.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Makes 6. About 2 hours, mostly proving.

Ingredients

500 g strong white bread flour
1 tsp fast-action dried yeast
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt
150 g natural yoghurt
150 ml warm water
2 tbsp vegetable oil
as needed melted butter and crushed garlic, to finish

Method

Mix the flour, yeast, sugar and salt.
Add the yoghurt, water and oil, and bring together into a soft dough.
Knead 8 to 10 minutes, until smooth and elastic, then prove 1 hour in a warm place, until doubled.
Divide into six, and roll each into a teardrop shape.
Cook on a very hot, dry griddle or under a hot grill, 1 to 2 minutes a side, until puffed and charred in patches.
Brush with melted butter and crushed garlic while still hot, if making garlic naan.

What a modern chef changes

Genuine tandoor heat, without a tandoor.

Rung 2.

Method

Slap the rolled dough directly onto the inner wall of a Big Green Egg run very hot, or onto a preheated pizza stone positioned high in the dome, replicating a tandoor's radiant, all-round heat far more closely than a flat griddle can.
Char it properly, with real dark spots, rather than pulling it early for an evenly pale bread, since an authentic tandoor naan is never uniformly golden.
Brush with garlic butter the moment it comes off the heat, not a minute later, so the butter melts into the bread's open, blistered surface rather than sitting on top of it.

Open in the atlas: cook mode, scaling and tick off lists