Two things today. Firstly, I did some wraps using Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s recipe from River Cottage, Veg Every Day.
Hugh’s recipe uses what he calls the Magic Bread Dough. Magic because you can use the same recipe to make Pizza, Flatbread, Pitta, Breadsticks and Rolls. He uses ingredients to make 8 flat breads, but I didn’t want that many for just me and DP, so I halved it. You could of course, divide up the full amount of Magic Dough into say, 2 pizza, 2 flatbread, 4 pitta and 2 rolls, or any other combination.

What do you need to make Flat Bread

• to make 4 flat breads
• 125g white flour 45p/1500, 4p
• 125g strong white flour, priced the same as value flour, although the AP bag was 50p for 3kg, 4p
• 1 scant tsp salt
• half tsp instant yeast, if you use a quarter of one of the 14p sachets, it would be 4p
• 1 tbslp oil, 1p

if you can, get a tub of instant yeast, it’s much cheaper than the sachets, a quarter of the price in fact.

How to Make Flat Bread

• put everything in a bowl and add 160ml warm water. Mix everything together and give it all a good knead for about 10 minutes, or if you have a food mixer, use the dough hook for 10 minutes, or you can use a food processor, process for 5 minutes.
• cover the bowl and leave it in a warm place to prove for an hour or two, until doubled in size. Flavour develops in this time, so leave it as long as you can.
• when the dough has risen, knock it back by punching it down and for these flatbreads, divide it into 4 equal pieces.

The recipe here says to roll them out to rough circles 2-3mm thick. It was fine rolling them out, but I did find that I needed to dust the worktop with a little flour or they stuck. And having rolled them out, you need to let them rest for 5 minutes. This proved a little difficult as you can’t stack them or they will stick together, so I draped one over a plate, one over a baking sheet I had just used, and left two on the worktop. Goodness knows how you do this for 8 of them!

• Heat a large frying pan or similar until very hot and place one of the flatbreads in.
• Let it cook for a minute or two until the top is bubbling and the cooked side has brown patches like a nan bread.
• Flip it over and do the other side.
• Put on a plate and cover with a tea towel while you do the other three.

Mine were extremely uneven circles, especially by the time I got them in the pan, so the bits of flatbread that didn’t fit the bottom of the pan were stuck to the sides of it, and it seemed to work fine.

They tasted wonderful, especially really fresh. But of course with a recipe that takes a long elapsed time like this one, it would be difficult to time it to a meal time. A gentle warming just before eating refreshed it beautifully.

In the book, the first recipe is shown with garlic butter on it, and that would be extraordinarily good, and like yorkshire puddings, a great, cheap filler, before a main event.

I had one with a chorizo and chick pea filling for lunch today and it was gorgeous. That is the second thing for today.

I used strong flour as in Hugh’s recipe because I had some cheap stuff from Approved Foods, but I’m sure they would work fine with all value range flour.

The fillings you can have in a flatbread are as variable as a sandwich. They make a nice change from sandwiches in a lunchbox, and can also be used with curries, like nan, and as a meal accompaniment with anything that you like.