Revisiting an Old Favorite: Navajo Frybread and Indian Tacos

Juli's son, Ian - a college junior - dropped by for a visit recently.  Juli wanted to serve up something for dinner beyond the typical college student fare.   She suggested Indian Tacos.

Those who have followed this blog for awhile will probably recall that I featured recipes for Navajo Frybread and Indian Tacos awhile back.  We used those same recipes (included in the linked posts) to prepare this special dinner.

Juli prepared the dough for the Frybread while I was still at work.  She thought she might have messed something up, as she wasn't sure what texture the dough was supposed to have, but she did a great job. When I got home, I took over in the kitchen and finished supper. 

The Navajo Frybread is pretty easy to make, really:  Roll out sections of the dough, heat up some oil, cook each round of dough for a couple minutes on each side. 

The Frybread turned out perfectly golden brown, crispy on the outside yet soft on the inside and flexible enough to fold around the taco filling without breaking apart.  

The filling for the Indian Tacos was also pretty easy - it cooks up in one skillet - and it also turned out great. 

Ian said he enjoyed the Indian Tacos. Juli and I enjoyed them just as much as we had last time we made them.  

Ian had to leave shortly after supper.  It would have been nice if he'd been able to stay longer, but at least the three of us had a nice meal together while he was here.

Indian Tacos + Dessert Frybread

Navajo Frybread can be eaten lots of ways.  It's great just spread with butter, or served along with stew or chili (it's great for soaking up the liquid from the bowl).   It also makes a great dessert.   Just sprinkle it with a bit of powdered sugar and cinnamon, then drizzle it with honey.

One of the most basic uses, though, is to top it with spiced meat and/or beans, cheese, tomatoes and other toppings to make an Indian Taco.   Although thicker than a typical taco shell or tortilla, frybread works great for this purpose.   In fact, because it's thicker, it can hold a lot more in the way of toppings without falling apart, and makes for a more hearty and satisfying taco.   One of these tacos is enough for a meal. 

There are a lot of different recipes for Indian Tacos.  Some are little more than typical ground-beef taco meat dumped atop a hunk of frybread.  Others involve large enough meat chunks that they resemble a stew or chili more than a taco.    Many of them, including my version below, include beans along with the meat.   In addition to the meat topping and cheese, tomatoes and sour cream are common toppings.  Lettuce is not as commonly included in Indian Tacos as in the Tex-Mex versions, though we did include it on ours.  Salsa, chopped onions, sliced or fried chili peppers and chopped cilantro are other common toppings. 

It should be noted that one batch of our Navajo Frybread recipe makes six pieces of frybread, which is enough to serve Indian Tacos for four, including dessert.   Four pieces of the Navajo Frybread are used to make four Indian Tacos, while the other two can be topped with sugar, cinnamon and honey and halved to make dessert for four.

Indian Tacos

yield = 4 servings

1        pound lean (90%) ground beef
1        small onion, finely-chopped
1        jalapeno, seeded and chopped
1        teaspoon minced garlic
2        teaspoons chili powder
1        teaspoon ground cumin
1/2     teaspoon dried oregano, crushed
1        can (15-ounce) chili beans
1/2     teaspoon freshly-ground black pepper
1/2     teaspoon table salt
4        pieces Navajo Frybread
1        cup shredded extra-sharp cheddar cheese
1        cup chopped leaf or iceberg lettuce
2        tomatoes, chopped
1/4     cup sour cream
          salsa, chilis, chopped cilantro or other garnishes
          of choice

Heat a large skillet over medium-high heat.  Add the ground beef and cook, using a wooden spoon to break up the meat, until it is about half-browned.  Add the onion and jalapeno and cook until the meat is completely browned. 

Add garlic, chili powder, cumin and oregano and cook until fragrant, about 1 minute.  Stir in chili beans, pepper and salt.  Reduce heat to low and cook, stirring occasionally, until the bean liquid has thickened.

Top each piece of frybread with 1/4 cup of cheese and 1/4 of the beef mixture, then serve.  Each person can add tomatoes, lettuce and sour cream to taste. 

Dessert Frybread

yield = 4 servings

2          pieces Navajo Frybread
1          tablespoon powdered sugar
1/4       teaspoon ground cinnamon
            honey (to taste)

Sprinkle each piece of Navajo Frybread evenly with sugar and cinnamon.  Slice each piece of frybread into two servings and serve with honey so each person can drizzle on honey to taste.

Navajo Frybread

I've written a fair bit about Indian cooking of the curry variety, but this time around, I'm writing about a different type of Indian cooking:  American Indian, or Native American,* if you prefer.

Frybread is one of the most basic recipes in American Indian cooking.   The Navajo version is probably the most famous, and many sources cite the Navajo as the tribe among which Indian frybread originated, but many other tribes have their own versions, each with numerous variations.  All Indian frybreads have some some things in common.   Essentially, they require one to mix flour, a bit of salt, baking powder, warm liquid of some sort (water, or milk, or both), and maybe some sort of oil into a dough.   The dough is shaped into flat, round or oval shapes and fried in very hot oil.  

When we vacationed in Arizona a couple years ago, we encountered, and quickly became quite fond of, Navajo frybread.   There were frybread stands here and there, both in town and out in the more rural areas.  Not too far from where we were staying, we found a little strip-mall restaurant that featured a menu mostly served with or on frybread.  Frybread topped with scrambled eggs, several different types of chili and frybread, frybread tacos, frybread with cinnamon sugar, or jam, or honey... we tried all of these, and probably some others I'm forgetting, and they were all delicious.   I'd tried some other versions of frybread many years before, but I barely remembered them; they hadn't made much of an impression.  The Navajo Frybread was unforgettable, and for awhile now I've wanted to try making it myself.

In seeking out a recipe for Navajo Frybread, I found no lack of contenders online.  Everyone from Emeril Lagasse to Smithsonian Magazine offered up a version, as did most of the major recipe sites and a number of tribal sites, not to mention the webpages of any number of individuals and organizations.   They were mostly pretty similar, which was good, as this provided some basis for comparison.   A few included atypical ingredients such as cornmeal, eggs or shortening, but most did not.  I ended up focusing on what looked like the most basic recipes for the traditional Navajo version of the recipe and studied them to come up with the most typical ratios of various ingredients.  The various recipes differed most in terms of the amount of liquid used.  Some specified the dough should be fairly dry, others suggested a stickier dough.    I decided to go conservative with the liquid,  then adjust upward from there to try to find the right texture. 

I started with 3/4 cup of water, the smallest amount of liquid suggested in any of the recipes I consulted.   I thought that would likely be too little liquid, and I was right.  The dough wouldn't really even come together with that little water.  I added another 1/4 cup, and that was better, but still not right, so I added yet another 1/4 cup - for a total of 1 1/4 cups - and that ended up being too much, with the dough being wet and very sticky.   I added in a bit more flour to make up for excessive water, and while I eventually got the dough to a manageable texture, I knew at that point the frybread probably wouldn't turn out well.  A lot of the recipes - including most of the ones I followed most closely in designing my own - warned quite clearly about over-working the dough, and having to repeatedly mix in more water, find the texture not right, then add more flour, then more water again... well, I was pretty sure that was more than enough kneading to qualify as over-working.  

Sometimes it sucks to be right.

Some of the recipes I studied called for rolling out pieces of the dough to make individual servings of frybread, while others stated one should flatten and shape the dough entirely by hand.    This appeared to be the more traditional technique, so I went with this.  That was a mistake.  The dough was stiff enough that shaping it by hand was not an easy task, so the dough got even more over-worked from my attempts to squish, stretch, pinch and otherwise shape the dough, but eventually I got several flat, round (well, sort of round, anyhow) pieces of dough ready to fry.

All the recipes stated to fry the bread in very hot oil, with suggested temperatures ranging from 350 to 375 degrees.  Traditionally, Navajo Frybread is often cooked in a cast-iron skillet, but knowing how much oil can splatter all over the stove top during frying, I wasn't about to keep with that tradition.  Instead, I used a Dutch oven.  I got the oil to about 370 degrees, then tossed in one of the rounds of dough to fry.  After a couple minutes on each side, the first one was done, and I continued with the others.

The results didn't look much like the Navajo Frybread we'd had in Arizona, and while they tasted good, the texture was all wrong.   Too chewy, not nearly enough puffiness.    That's what comes from over-working the dough.    The taste was right, though, and the bread had cooked through despite being pretty tough, so I knew I was on the right track.     I decided immediately that I'd make up another batch of frybread, and tradition be darned, this time I'd roll them out.   Maybe an expert frybread-maker can manage to shape them by hand without ending up with thick, rubbery frybread, but I clearly didn't have the right amount of skill.  Or maybe some people just like their frybread to have texture similar to that of a mouth full of rubber bands.

In making the second batch of dough, I had a better idea how much water to use, so this time the dough came together with a minimum of hassles.  After letting the dough rest, I divided it up into servings, then rolled them out.  I started heating the oil while I rolled out the dough, and therein lay a near-catastrophe.

I was shooting for 370 degrees, but somehow the oil went from about 270 to way, way too hot within what seemed a couple minutes time.   When I next checked it, the thermometer was registering past 400 degrees, and the oil was starting to smoke.  I went to turn the burner temperature way down, and as I did, I heard a pop.   I had a pretty good idea what had happened, and I was right.  I could see shards of thin glass at the bottom of the Dutch oven; my thermometer had broken from being heated past its range.

That oil wasn't going to be usable any more, and with the oil that hot, that Dutch oven wasn't going to be available for awhile, either.   Juli had originally suggested I cook the frybread in our Presto electric skillet, since that was large enough to cook two rounds of bread at the same time, so I went with that.  Thankfully, we had just enough fresh oil to cover the bottom of the skillet in oil to a depth of about 1/2 inch.  One advantage of the Presto is that you can select a specific temperature, so in short order I had heated the oil to 370 and put in the first two rounds.  Right away I knew this batch was going to work out much, much better than had the first one.   The rounds of dough immediately puffed up, forming the same big bubbles I'd remembered from the Navajo Frybread we'd had in Arizona.  A few minutes later, we had another batch of frybread ready.

After one bite we both knew we had the recipe and technique figured out.   This batch of Navajo Frybread was excellent... great flavor, and not the least bit greasy due to how quickly they'd cooked in such hot oil.  The rounds were crispy on the outside, yet soft on the inside, and flexible enough to bend around toppings to form a taco.

I'll write more about tacos made with Navajo Frybread, and some other good things you can do with the Frybread, in another post.

Navajo Frybread

yield = 6 servings

3       cups all-purpose flour
1/2    cup dry powdered milk
1       tablespoon baking powder
1/2    teaspoon salt
1       cup + 3 tablespoons hot water
         vegetable oil for frying

Mix the flour, milk, baking powder and salt in a large bowl.   Make a well in the middle of the flour mixture and pour in one cup of water.   Use your hands to mix the ingredients into a thick, slightly-sticky dough, adding in as much of the additional three tablespoons of water as necessary to get the right texture.  Spray the bottom of a medium-sized bowl with nonstick cooking spray, then add the dough.  Turn it over to oil both sides, lay plastic wrap directly over the dough and set aside.   Let the dough rest at least 30 minutes.

After the dough has rested, roll the dough ball into a cylinder.  Slice the dough into 6 evenly-sized portions, rolling each into a ball then flattening it slightly.   Sprinkle a counter top or other work surface lightly with flour.  Take one of the dough balls, set it on the floured surface, then flip it over.  Using a rolling pin, roll the dough out to form a disc or oval about 8-10 inches in diameter.  Shake off excess flour, then repeat with the rest of the dough balls, stacking them on a plate.

Pour oil into an electric skillet or Dutch oven to a depth of 1/2 inch or more.  Heat to 370 degrees.   Add one of the dough discs (or two, if there is ample room for them to not overlap) to the hot oil, being careful to not splash the oil.   Cook for about two minutes or until lightly browned on the first side, pressing down on any overly-large bubbles that may form, then flip and cook another 1-2 minutes or until lightly browned.  Using tongs, lift the frybread from the oil, allowing excess oil to drip off, then transfer to a plate or baking sheet lined with 3 layers of paper towels.  Repeat with the remainder of the dough, then serve.


* Should anyone take offense to my use of the name "Indian" in reference to the people who were already living in North America when the Europeans arrived, I sincerely apologize, as no offense is intended.   Most of the Native folk I've known have used the term 'Indian' in preference to 'Native American,' so that's the term I use as well.

Navajo Frybread