July’s Sourdough Surprises is gozleme, a stuffed Turkish flatbread cooked on a flat griddle. I first heard about this in Mastering the Art of Baking by Anneka Manning (p233), and it’s been on my list of bread to try for ages. There aren’t any sourdough recipes for gozleme for us to work off of this month, but as it’s just a stuffed flatbread I figured I’d just be able to use a pretty standard pita-style flatbread recipe that I’ve used before with my Sodo starter. But of course that didn’t stop me doing some extra research on gozleme, including:

• The Grauniad’s halloumi gozleme
• BBC Good Food’s spiced lamb and feta
• Australian Women’s Weekly

As thought, it’s pretty standard flatbread, rolled thin, then fried on a griddle. The only differenced are in the liquid: most use water, but Mastering Baking uses milk and the Women’s Weekly uses yogurt. This reminded me of a Yotam Ottolenhghi yogurt flatbread I’ve been meaning to try (Plenty, p23), so I’m think I’m going to go with that twist and use 0% Greek yogurt.

For the refresh:

• 250g fridge starter
• 250ml warm water
• 175g strong white flour
• 50g strong wholemeal flour
• 25g rye flour

This got a full 8-hour refresh over night. Not really needed for a flatbread I suppose, but I didn’t have time to refresh & rise all in one day this weekend so it had to be this way.

For the dough:

• 150g refreshed starter
• 175g strong white flour
• 50g strong wholemeal flour
• 25g rye flour
• 200g Greek yogurt
• 1 tsp salt

I starter with 150g of yogurt, replacing 125g of water, but ended up having to add a few extra tablespoons to get it to form a dough, so I’m estimating it was about 200g in the end.

This gets kneaded together in the mixer, then rises for a few hours with stretching and folding every hour.

For the filling I’m going with the BBC Good Food filling, with added French beans because I’ve just harvested another two kilos of them from the garden and they need using up!

• 300g French beans
• 500g pack lamb mince
• 4 garlic cloves, crushed
• 2 tsp ground cumin
• 2 tsp ground coriander
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1 tsp chilli powder
• 50g raisins
• 3 spring onions, finely sliced
• 50g toasted pine nuts
• 100g feta cheese

First the French beans get steamed in the microwave. Then the mince is fried up with the garlic and spices, and the beans, spring onions, nuts & raisins are added as it cools.

The dough is split into four equal parts and rolled out thin, then the filling is added, topped with feta.

It’s then folded over, and it’s time to griddle it.

About that griddle…

We got ourselves a proper cast iron griddle a few months ago, but we’ve not been that happy with it. It certainly looks the part, but the problem with using it on our gas hob is that even if you let it warm up for an hour, it still has hotspots under the burners. Most of the recipes suggest using a non-stick frying pan, and we’ve done flatbreads like that before and they work really well, so I’ll stick with that.

Transferring to the pan turned out to be harder than we expected…

And turning it over was worse!

We got better at it, and by the last one it worked properly! However transferring with scrapers probably isn’t the best way to do things. If we did it again we’d put on a tray and slide into the pan to avoid the lifting that caused the tears.

We’re serving with tzatziki, or cacık as the Turkish call it, basically following this BBC Good Food recipe, but with extra garlic (of course), and some za’tar and olives on top.

Finally some salad from the garden, with a Dijon vinaigrette, completes the meal.

Despite the cooking problems, everything tastes great!

All the extra refreshing and rising time for the flatbreads made them lovely and light. The edges, without the filling, was great with the tzatziki. The stuffing has a lovely warm spicy flavour; the heat grows as you eat it but is nicely tempered by the tzatziki and salad.

This is certainly something we’ll do again. It’s something that would be great to use up whatever is lying around in the fridge threatening to go off.

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Check out the other gozlemes made for Sourdough Surprises…