by Woodsbum
I love Indian Fry Bread. I really love it. What I have found is that there are several different options when making it. The more traditional way is to make it with bannock dough as opposed to a yeast based bread dough. This way makes it have a better flavor and less greasy.
For those of you who do not know what fry bread is, here is a picture of some I made a few days ago.
Fry Bread
The real difference between making bannock dough or bread dough is in the use of yeast. Bread dough uses yeast where bannock uses baking powder. The bread dough also tends to “puff” up or leave really big air pockets when frying. Although this is really nice when slathering your fry bread with honey or jam, it makes it really hard to use in other applications. For instance, I like to either turn them into tacos or make them into little pizzas. If you have a big ball of fried bread dough instead of something flat, your toppings will end up more on your plate than on your fry bread.
Although I have published bannock recipes here before, I would like to put this one out here. Most of my bannock dough is made by the eyeball method for cooking over open flame so this will give you some very specific measurements for once.
- 3 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 1/4 teaspoons baking powder
- 1 1/3 cups warm water
- ½ teaspoon salt
Mix everything until it becomes like a bread dough and not like biscuit dough where it is all sticky. Sometimes you have to kneed it/mix it for a while to get to that point. After you mix it all together just put a wet towel, plastic wrap, etc., over the bowl and refrigerate it for about an hour. When the hour is up just divide it into 8 equal portions, roll it out flat, and then fry it in oil (around 350 degrees until golden brown). This amount of dough will make about 8 round pieces of flat bread that end up around the size of a saucer or a little bigger.
Again, the nice thing about using this recipe is that you don’t end up with a big, fried bread ball that holds a lot of the oil.
If you do tacos or pizzas, the size above is about right. If you just want to do honey or jam, I usually divide this recipe into 16 portions just so you don’t have stuff dripping off one side while you gnaw on the other.
One variation to the recipe includes cinnamon and sugar in the dough to be eaten as a dessert. Basically, you can get as creative as you want with this.
