Soft Wrap Flatbread Sandwich

Flatbread fresh from the skillet

I've always wished I could bake at the apartment but alas, I do not have an oven. However, my wish came true when I found this recipe at a blog. It was a flatbread that could be baked on a skillet. After some investigation, I found out it came from none other than the KA baking site! However, the blog poster mentioned that she used whole wheat flour instead of the original AP flour, so I decided to use WW flour as well. And what else did I use but the very nice White Whole Wheat Flour (Bob's Red Mill) that I found (finally!) at Healthy Options in Greenbelt. It was quite expensive (they only had organic WWW), but the sight of organic white whole wheat flour was quite exciting. It looked a lot like whole wheat pastry flour.

The first time, I did the recipe to the letter, but halving the ingredients so I came up with 4 flat breads. Putting boiling water at the start made a big difference in the manageability of the dough. It was very easy to knead and work with, I hardly needed to knead at all! I had to add more water (about 1 cup), though and a little bit more after I added the other dry ingredients. I dry-fried them on the wok soon after the 2nd proofing and they turned out great! I thought they were a bit on the salty side, though (I used a bit more than 1/2 tsp of salt), but I didn't find the breads salty the next day. Weird.

Tuna soft wrap sandwich with a dash of vinegar and pepper. It was quite good...

The next time (this morning, actually), I decided to be smart-ass and do my own variation. I wanted something creamy like naan, so I decided to put in some yogurt. And I wanted to freeze the doughs so I would always have fresh baked flat breads. The initial variations I made were:

Half-recipe:
1. 1/2 tsp of salt
2. 1 tsp of sugar
3. slightly heaping 1/2 tsp of yeast (for freezing)
4. a pack of yogurt (1/2 cup)
5. divided the dough into 5 pcs instead of 4

Unfortunately for me I may have made a recipe for disaster right from the start. Looking back, the answers are obvious: I didn't thoroughly read the recipe because I thought I already knew what it was about. I was a stingy with the boiling water because I wanted the yogurt to take center stage (I was planning to mix it after adding the dry ingredients). I didn't mix the boiling water and flour until it was smooth (a major oversight)!

I was wondering why the water-and-flour mixture was still sticky after the 30 minute rest, but thought it was just a quirk and proceeded to add the 2nd dry ingredients. Here is where another bumble took place. The dough seemed too stiff so I kept adding more yogurt, until the whole pack was gone! Really, I don't think that 1 1/2 cups of flour would need that much yogurt. Everything was a sticky mess that wouldn't come together. The previous dough was a dream to knead, but the new dough variation was a nightmare! I struggled and struggled until I ended up adding about 1/4 cup more flour and more potato flakes. I relented after many long minutes of kneading and let it rise for about half the time for the first rise, cut it up into 5 pcs (I could've made it 6), and tossed the shaped dough into the freezer. Here's hoping that the dough could be saved. I hate to throw away perfectly good ingredients.

Update:
I baked the frozen-and-thawed dough. The dough was very sticky so I had to roll it between 2 pieces of cling wrap. Baking took considerably longer. The bread also did not develop wrinkles and bubbles. When I fished it out of the pan, it was very soft - extremely so. Still, I used it for my standard soft-wrap. It was passable, considering that the taste is mostly from the filling, but the taste and texture of the bread itself was a disappointment. Obviously, adding all that yogurt did not affect the taste at all (it was bland), and the texture is shot. It was too mushy and squishy. I'll be sticking to the original recipe next time, adding just a tsp. of sugar.