The hidden layers of flour and oil help the layers lift and separate into flaky layers as you fry the pancakes. This snail of wound dough is left to rest again, and then rolled into the final pancake. But instead of frying them right away, you brush them with oil, sprinkle them with scallions (for scallion pancakes), and roll the pancake into a tight cigar, and then the cigar into a snail. The core of scallion pancakes is also a simple, yeast-free, dough, also kneaded and left to rest before you roll it out. With yeast scarce, I decided to revisit these flatbreads early in our Inside Days and see if I could make headway with them using scallion pancakes as my guide. But they’re never as good as I want them to be.

Once rolled thin, they’re pan-fried, and look, they’re fiiine. It’s kneaded together as you would a yeasted bread dough and left to rest for about 30 minutes, sometimes an hour, during which a transformation occurs and the dough becomes springy and smooth and very lovely to work with, like a freshly-opened can of Play-Doh.

Sometimes there’s baking powder, sometimes there’s not. For many years I’ve been fascinated by variations on yeast-free yogurt flatbread recipes (sometimes called yeast-free naan) that follow a loose formula of a cup of yogurt, a couple cups of flour, some salt, fat, and water.

Flat breads