For my first recipe to try from Nik Sharma’s Season cookbook, I chose his Margherita Naan Pizza.

This recipe called for two other recipes as well: ghee and naan dough. (I’m not counting this as my attempt at his naan, since the pizza only required the dough. I’ll cook it another time.) For the naan dough, Sharma calls for either all-purpose flour or whole-wheat pastry flour with the comment “I use whole-wheat pastry flour to make naan because it contains more fiber than all-purpose flour but less gluten, which helps produce a softer bread.” With that encouragement coupled with my wife’s attempt to decrease her gluten consumption, I figured I’d give the whole-wheat version a shot. For the pizza itself, the only unusual-to-me ingredient was nigella seeds. I was able to find both at my local international farmer’s market, though the nigella seeds were labelled as black caraway seeds, apparently a common labeling.

The only issue with the prep was the naan dough: I had it rising in the oven out of the way, and a family member preheated the oven to make something else and completely cooked it. Fortunately I had enough of the pastry flour to make a second batch, but I had used up the called-for active dry yeast and had to use some instant yeast we had on hand. I’m not sure how much of a difference that made, but the dough had not doubled in size when it came time to make dinner. I moved forwards anyways.

The pizza was quite spicy. The recipe calls for a teaspoon of dried red chili flakes per personal pizza. For me, spicy was the dominant flavor; for my wife, it was unbearably spicy. The crust came out crunchy, more like a flatbread than a pizza. I don’t know how much of this was the yeast versus the whole-wheat flour versus not having risen as expected. I’m interested in trying this again with an all-purpose flour version of the naan dough and a more judicious amount of chili flakes.

I am cooking my way through Nik Sharma’s Season cookbook. Read more about it.