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Bulgur Bread (Nane Casoki)

A brilliant recipe that makes tasty simple flat bread, delicious eaten with savory soups or tart applesauce.   The onion ends up mostly sweet, and just the slightest bit savory.  The recipe comes from Kurdistan, via my favorite cookbook, Flatbreads and Flavors, by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid.  I make it with whole wheat flour; they recommend unbleached hard white flour, which probably also works fine.  

2 cups bulgur, finest grade you can find
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup onion, finely chopped
2 cups boiling water

200 grams hard white wheat milled fine, plus some unbleached flour for rolling out the dough; or 2 cups hard white wheat flour; or 2 cups unbleached bread flour

Stir together the bulgur, salt, and onion.  Add the boiling water and let soak 30 minutes or longer.

In a food processor, mix the bulgur with about 1 cup of the flour.  When it balls up and starts to clean the sides of the bowl, give it another 15-20 seconds.  Add some of the extra flour if needed to get a firm dough.

Let the dough relax, covered, until you're ready to roll it out, at least 20 minutes; you can wrap it in plastic and refrigerate it for a day or two if you want.  

When you're about an hour away from baking, preheat the oven, with your baking stone or bricks or what have you.

Now divide the dough into pieces to roll out and bake.  The original calls for dividing this quantity of dough into 8 pieces, to roll into breads 8 to 10 inches in diameter.  I find those are a bit too large to be conveniently packed for lunches, so prefer to make 12-16 smaller breads.  

Generously flour your board.  Roll them out as thin as you can--this is where the fine bulgur comes into play--at some point, you're limited by the coarseness of your bulgur.  They should definitely be no thicker than 1/8 inch.

You're going to bake them directly on the baking stone, about 1-2 minutes per side, flipping them over, and baking the other side.  

Ideally, you want to be set up with a place to stack the baked breads, good oven mitts, and room for rolling out the breads, and get into a rhythm--roll several out, slap them on the baking stones or tiles (if you were generous enough with the flour, they will easily lift up and off the bread board or slipat sheet), roll another one or two, flip the baking breads (again, if they're generously floured, they won't stick to the bricks at this point, and you can flip them right up in your hand with a mit or use a spatula to lift and flip), roll a couple more, then pull out the first set of 2 or 4, and put in the ones you just rolled.

It takes more time to heat the stones than to bake the breads, even with the rolling built in.

Alford and Duguid also suggest baking some of them longer, to partly crisp them up.  I haven't ever tried this, because I enjoy the soft chewy version so much.


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