Tomorrow I’m going to try slow-cooking dinner: set it off in the morning before work, and come home to it cooked. At least that’s the plan…

I’m going to be doing a vegetable Moroccan tagine, so as I’m working from home today I’ve decided to slide in making some flatbreads between spreadsheets and Skype calls :S

So I’m taking a basic bread recipe (5 parts flour to 3 parts water) and adding in spices and chickpeas:

• 250g strong white flour
• 150ml water (from the chickpea can)
• 2 tsp olive oil
• 1 tsp instant yeast
• 1 tsp salt
• 200g (half a can) chickpeas
• 1 tbsp coriander seeds
• 2 tsp jeera (cumin) seeds

The seeds get crushed in a pestle & mortar, then all dry ingredients go into the mixer (salt and yeast kept separate). The chick-peas get mashed (I couldn’t be bothered removing the skins…), and then we’re ready to mix and knead with the dough hook.

After 5 minutes kneading it was still really wet, so I added some extra flour, 1 maybe 2 tbsps. After another few minutes the dough looked and felt good.

This was left to prove for an hour, and the oven was set to 200c fan with the baking stone in the centre of the oven to heat up.

The dough hadn’t doubled in size in an hour, probably because it wasn’t very warm in the house, but I needed to get a move on to fit cooking them in before a Skype call… so I had to go with the dough as it was!

So I split the dough into 4 rather large balls, and roll then out into rough oval shapes.

The baking stone then comes out of the oven, gets a dusting of course semolina, then the flatbreads go on (they only just fit…) and then it’s into the oven.

They didn’t puff up in the oven like pita breads do, possibly due to the extra chickpeas in the dough, or not rising properly. After 10 minutes they didn’t look done, so I gave then another 5 minutes and then they looked good (although as I hadn’t rotated during cooking the one at the back right had a lot more colour than the ones at the front…).

So we’ll see how they taste tomorrow with the slow cooker tagine. They certainly smell good!