Bazlama (Thick Leavened Flatbread from the Griddle)

Variations

• With yoghurt: replace part of the water with plain yoghurt for a softer crumb that keeps better into the next day. A common household version in Turkey.
• Bazlama tostu: split a cooled loaf through the side, fill it with cheese and sausage and press it in the pan. It has enough thickness to be split, and being splittable is what makes it a sandwich.
• Alongside gözleme: two breads off the same iron plate in the same kitchens, one rolled to a millimetre around a filling and one cooked 2cm thick. What separates them is not the ingredients but whether anything is in the way.
• Smaller: 150g pieces at 12cm across give a breakfast size; two minutes a side is enough.
• In an oven: 8-10 minutes on a stone or heavy tray at 250°C. It works, but the colour comes up evenly and the mottled griddle spotting is gone.

Tips

• A bread with a crumb, made without an oven — and the difficulty is fixed. An oven heats from every direction; a griddle heats one face at a time. Getting heat to the middle of 2cm of dough takes time, and the face on the metal keeps cooking throughout. Every instruction here — medium-low, several turns, no oil — takes a share of that one problem.
• It is gözleme's situation inverted. That page says a filling means the puffing "cannot happen at all", and concludes that "the heat only gets through by conduction — which is why the dough has to be rolled to paper". Bazlama has nothing in the way. The bubbles the yeast made, and the steam inside them, lift the dough and carry heat inward, so thickness is available.
• Hotteok solves the same problem from the other end. It presses the bread flat so that, as its page puts it, the conduction distance is short enough for the inside to cook. That is shortening the distance; bazlama keeps the distance and buys the time by dropping the flame. Which option you have depends on what is inside: hotteok has molten boiling sugar in it, and bazlama has only dough.
• No oil in the pan — and thickness adds a second reason. Gözleme also uses a dry plate, but its reason is that the bread has to fold and be held in the hand. Here fat would fry the face brown long before the centre had set. The butter goes on after.
• All that turning is correct. Left long on one side, that face dries while the other is cold. Turned every two or three minutes, the heat goes in alternately from both sides and meets in the middle.
• Heat control's readings do not transfer. Its signals are ripples in the oil and the sound food makes going in, and dough laid on a dry plate makes almost no sound at all. What you read instead is how long the first spots take: black in a minute is too hot, no colour at four minutes is too cool.
• Keep the dough slack. As dough and gluten has it, dough that will not roll is a time problem rather than a strength problem. Here a stiff dough carries a second penalty: less water means less steam to make, and that steam is what carries heat to the middle.
• Do not skip the last twenty minutes. The gas raised while the rounded pieces rest is what lifts the bread on the griddle. Rolled and cooked straight away, it sets flat.
• Wrapping them in a cloth is part of the cooking. Straight off the pan the crust is stiff; wrapped, the steam coming out of the crumb softens it into a bread that folds. Once cold, thirty seconds a side in a dry pan brings it back.