Yesterday I shared a FANTASTIC (and I mean fantastic) recipe for a tomato-based swordfish curry from Oman. It was truly one of the most interesting (but not so interesting it doesn’t taste good) things I’ve made in quite some time, and got me really excited to cook my way through some other traditional Omani dishes. Because I still struggle to determine what is the right amount of work to take for any given task at any given moment, I decided to serve the curry not with basmati rice (one of the suggestions) but these traditional Omani flatbreads. I started this project in the very late afternoon (frankly bordering on evening) which, in retrospect, was not reasonable and resulted in a 10pm dinner on a Sunday night.
Sometimes this happens at my house, and it’s due to my sheer excitement. But my 10pm dinner shouldn’t make you panic or deter you from trying these breads which are, I think, an absolutely wonderful partner for the curry. You should just start them earlier in the day or make them the day before. You can also cut the recipe in half, because it makes quite a lot of flatbreads, though I ended up eating them with eggs for the rest of the week and was pretty thrilled to have them hanging out in the refrigerator.
If making bread sounds intimidating, also please check that notion at the door. This isn’t a sourdough boule (I haven’t mastered that yet either), it’s a quick dough with some added regional surprises (date syrup! crushed fennel seeds!) and I think it would be really difficult to mess it up. All you need to do is let it rest for the allotted time, and get ready for some bicep work in the form of rolling and folding. You cook these by sticking them on a hot, dry cast iron pan for about 2 minutes until they’re spotted and brown in some places.
Because of all the folding you’ll do, you end up with triangular flatbreads that have several layers and puff up when they touch the hot pan. So instead of being thick or tough, the individual layers make them extremely tender and flaky. And nice and flexible for grabbing curry and shoveling it into your mouth.
I can’t wait to try out more recipes from this book (there’s another traditional bread recipe that apparently requires a paint stripping tool to get them off the pan- obviously that is on the to-do list), but in the meantime please do get cracking on the curry with flatbread- I hope you’ll love it as much as I do!
Ingredients
- 5 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon kosher salt
- 1 teaspoon fennel seeds, coarsely crushed in a mortar and pestle
- 1 large egg
- 1/4 cup date syrup
- 1/4 to 1/2 cup vegetable oil
Instructions
- Whisk together the flour, salt and fennel seeds in a large bowl. Add the egg, date syrup and 1 1/4 cups water (adding a sprinkle more if necessary), mixing until a dry-ish dough forms; knead with strength until smooth, 7 to 8 minutes. Cover with a damp kitchen towel and let rest at least 30 minutes.
- Rub your hands liberally with vegetable oil, pinch an egg-size ball of dough off and roll it in your hands to make a ball. Using a rolling pin, roll it out into a large thin circle, 8 to 10 inches. Brush the surface of the dough with a little oil. Fold the circle in half, rub with more oil, then fold in half again to make a triangle. Roll the triangle out until thin, keeping its shape as much as possible, until it is about 8 inches long at its longest point. Set aside on a baking sheet until ready to cook. Repeat with the remaining dough.
- Heat a large cast-iron skillet or other heavy skillet over medium-low to medium heat and sprinkle with a little oil; cook the bread about 1 1/2 minutes, then flip, oiling a little if necessary, and cook until brown in spots and cooked dough, about 1 1/2 minutes more. Repeat with all the dough pieces. Eat as a snack or serve alongside a curry.
Notes
From The Food of Oman
