Pastry & pies Fasting
Lepinja
A soft, airy bakery flatbread, split for kebapi or torn alongside beans and ajvar.
Recipe from Туѓино Јабано
- Prep
- 1 hr 45 min
- Cook
- 10 min
- Total
- 1 hr 55 min
- Fasting
- Suitable
Ingredients 7 ingredients
Method
- Stir the yeast and sugar into the lukewarm water and leave it ten minutes, until it froths.
- Mix the flour and salt in a wide bowl, pour in the yeast water and the oil, and bring it together into a slack, sticky dough.
- Knead for eight to ten minutes. Resist adding flour: the wetness is what gives lepinja its open, steamy inside.
- Oil the bowl, turn the dough in it, cover and leave it to double — about an hour in a warm kitchen.
- Knock it back, divide into six, shape each piece into a ball and rest them under a cloth for ten minutes so the gluten slackens.
- Press each ball out to a disc about 15 cm across and 1.5 cm thick on a floured tray. Score a shallow diamond lattice across the top with the back of a knife — it stops the bread ballooning into one hollow dome.
- Cover and prove for 25 minutes, meanwhile heating the oven and a heavy baking tray to their highest setting, at least 250°C.
- Slide the breads onto the hot tray and bake for 8 to 10 minutes, until risen and patched with brown. Sprinkle them with water and wrap them in a cloth as they come out; that steam is what keeps the crust soft.
If you cannot find it
Substitutions that work outside Macedonia.
- Brašno tip 500 (Macedonian bread flour)
- Strong white bread flour of about 12% protein; weaker flour gives a flatter, heavier bread.
- Fresh yeast
- 7 g dried yeast, stirred into the flour instead of dissolved in the water.
- A bakery's stone hearth
- A heavy baking tray or pizza stone, heated in the oven for half an hour before baking.
