Recipe for Armenian Lavash

Bread is a dish that every people has invented. And always the peculiarities of everyday life, climate and agriculture impose their impressions on appearance and recipes. So, in the Russian oven and on leaps and bounds soft and lush bread turns out. But the peoples of the Caucasus and the nomadic tribes of the Middle East had different ovens, we know them as tandyr, although this name varies little from people to people.

Tandoor - a specially arranged clay brazier, which is installed in the courtyard on a clay platform and covered with a thick layer of clay on top to keep the heat longer. Food in such a furnace is prepared either on a grate, which is installed on the furnace neck. But the bread is baked in a special way: gluing the cakes of dough to the walls of the oven.

They call such bread lavash. Unfortunately, it was not possible to accurately determine the origin of the word "lavash" to linguists. Presumably, the first part of the "lav" is borrowed from the Chinese language, but the ending of "ash" is definitely of Turkic origin and translated into Russian as "food". It is believed that the word "lavash" came to the Caucasus from the Turkic language.

In fact, lavash - this thin flat cake. But it is also different, so, against an overall background, there is Armenian lavash. The fact is that it is much thinner than any other. The recipe for Armenian thin lavash will be given below.

Of course, it's impossible to cook real lavash at home , as it is unlikely that someone has a real tandyr at home. However, the dish, as close to the original, you can try to cook in the oven or in a pan.

In the future, everything depends on how accurately the hostess wants to reproduce the recipe of Armenian lavash. If you just need to reproduce the form, and there is no desire to understand how to make the same lavash, then everything will be extremely simple. It will take only water, flour, yeast and salt. All the ingredients are kneaded into a not very stiff dough, which is convenient to roll out, and leave in the warmth to approach. Then the dough is divided into small balls and rolled into very thin cakes. The resulting cakes are put on a baking tray and put in a preheated oven. Five minutes later, the baking tray must be removed and the pita bread turned to fry on both sides.

It is possible to bake pita bread on a dry frying pan, in its own way it is even more convenient, because it will be much easier to turn pita bread. And there's no point in being afraid to overdry it. In this case, you can use another feature of lavash: if it is sprinkled with cold water and left in the heat, after a while it will become soft.

But if you want to know how to make the Armenian lavash as close to the original as possible, then there may be some difficulties. And it's not even the absence of a tandoor, it's the tenth thing. The fact is that in the original recipe for Armenian lavash, the so-called tutkhmor, a sour dough.

It is quite clear that the yeast in Armenia was simply not known, and they were replaced with similar products as far as they could. It is quite logical that first you need to make a dough for leaven. However, it is also possible to bake lavash from it. From the previous version, this dough is cast by one ingredient. Instead of yeast, this recipe for Armenian lavash assumes the use of the Armenian sour-milk product - mutsun. This product is prepared from boiled milk of cows or other animals. To get it in most regions is difficult, so in principle, it can be replaced with kefir.

Three parts mutsun mixed with one part of the water, add salt. Then this mixture is gradually poured into the flour laid in a separate bowl and knead the dough. Now the dough should be left for 30 minutes in a warm place. After that it will be easier to roll out.

Then the dough is divided into small pieces and forms balls from them. One such ball should be put into glassware, closed with a lid and put into the refrigerator. It will become a leaven for the future. Roll the remaining balls into thin, up to 1 mm, flat cakes. Bake flat cakes in the same way as in the previous recipe.

With the use of sourdough, the recipe of Armenian lavash is slightly different, but only slightly. The sour must first be kept warm for a while, and then dissolve it in warm water with salt. Further technology is no different, except that the process of fermentation of the test for leaven is longer - it should not be half an hour, but 3-4.