Flatbread Fire

My wife has recently converted me to the delights of topped flatbread cooked over the fire. This like the farmhouse sink we installed in July seems very much like something that’s been missing from my life all this time, like an iPhone thrust into the hands of a toddler.

Grilled bread might seem like a dubious proposition to the uninitiated, but I confess I have a long history with it. I started making grilled flatbread maybe fifteen years ago; there were many years of my life, in my younger wildman days, when I lived in an even more remote part of Alaska than chez Ticky-Tacky and making my own grilled flatbread was the only way I could have bread to eat. To say it plainly, I’ve always sucked at making loaf bread in the oven, but any fool can roll out some dough and toss it on the grill for a few minutes. Over time, I got addicted to both the smoky flavor and the process.

I don’t offer up many recipes on the internet–I find them tedious both to follow and to write–but it seems like this post would be incomplete without one.

Grilled Flatbread
2 cups flour
½ cup lukewarm water
1 teaspoon yeast
1 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons olive oil

Directions: Mix the yeast with the sugar and a half cup of warm water and let it sit for ten minutes. Mix the flour and salt together with a fork, then add the yeast-sugar-water mixture. Mix until you have a ball of dough that you can just touch without big clumps of it sticking to your hands (you might need to add a little more water or flour as needed). Knead it for three minutes, then let it rest for two minutes, then knead it again for three more minutes. Pour the olive oil in the bowl, then put the dough in with it and flop it around so the oil coats both the dough and the bowl. Let it stand someplace warm to rise for an hour.

While it’s rising, light your fire and let it burn down to a bed of cooking coals. Read some Pablo Neruda poems, or maybe some Coleridge if it’s that kind of evening. Set your grill over the coals and let it warm up while you roll out your first flatbread. Punch the dough down, then pull out a handful of dough. Pat it between your hands back and forth a few times, then lay it down on a floured board and roll it out as thin as you can get it. (It should be slightly stretchy.) With this done, lay it directly on the grill. You’ll quickly see bubbles rising; it only needs a couple minutes on each side, so flip it over and let the other side cook.

Generally speaking, I roll out the next flatbread while the first side is cooking, but that’s just me being obsessed with efficiency, a state of being persistently eludes me. 

When you’re done, pile one of the flatbreads with grilled meat, fresh chopped green onions and tomatoes from the greenhouse. Slap on a little tzatziki sauce, maybe some feta or grilled halloumi. Roll it up and pause a moment to let go of the charred hot dogs of your youth before you break on through to the other side.