Welcome to Never Fail, a weekly column where we wax poetic about the recipes that never, ever let us down. This week: the flatbread recipe that editorial web assistant Emma Wartzman just couldn't live without.
I am not a bread person. Don't get me wrong: I love bread. But what I mean is that I don't bake bread. Sure, I aspire to have my own sourdough starter one day, and use it every week to make a beautiful, crackly-crusted loaf I can call my own—but pretty much in the same way that I hope to someday enjoy cardio workouts, or be more productive in the mornings. But such is life and so, for now, I make flatbread.
"But flatbread is bread," you might be thinking. Technically, you're right. But, as far as I'm concerned, bread is by definition hard to make, and this homemade flatbread recipe is maybe easier to make than scrambled eggs. No component of it has to be kept alive over days and weeks and months, fed flour and water and doted on with as much care as you would give your own child. Not that kind of thing. All you need to make this flatbread is six ingredients, one bowl, one pan, and a group of people to feed. (You don't even technically need the group of people, but it helps to have someone to say, "Wow! You made homemade flatbread! You're amazing!")
The brilliance of this particular recipe, courtesy of Joshua McFadden of Ava Gene's in Portland, OR, is the addition of yogurt, which gives the flatbread some of the appealing tanginess that you would get from a complicated sourdough bread. And the rest of the ingredients are things I almost always have on hand: flour, baking powder, a tiny amount of sugar, some salt, and a bit of olive oil. All you have to do is mix it all together and knead for about a minute until you have a relatively smooth mass. The recipe says to divide the dough into four pieces, but I often divide it into eight smaller guys. (I often double the recipe if I'm cooking for a lot of people.) Then you let the pieces of dough rest for about 15 minutes, allowing everything to mingle and hydrate, which in turn will make the flatbread easier to roll out.
