Frybread!

Azia & I made frybread tonight. I haven’t ever really attempted to make frybread, at least not in the last ten years. Too many other people I know make it really well, so it generally seems like a better plan to leave that to people who know what they’re doing. But, I decided it’s becoming too embarrassing that I don’t really know how to make it. So we began our experiment.





Israel thought he knew how to make it. Well, he remembered that there needed to be a hole in the middle to let all the bad spirits escape. And the bugs. After retelling the background behind those details he couldn’t really remember much else. Hopefully I don’t have any bugs in my flour, but that is sort of typical Israel. Any interesting bits of story stick in his mind. Forever. He retells them for whoever will listen. Practical details and technicalities much less so. So after we moved on to actually mixing and frying he wandered away and began designing some sort of ultralight aircraft.

Azia is much more about the immediate and practical. And eating greasy, buttery food. She couldn’t remember how to make frybread but was eager to get started. She thought we should call Maysa’s Grandma Janice since, “she makes the best frybread and she makes it for all the Powwows.” This would be a good plan, except I highly doubt Janice cooks with a recipe. Then as soon as we started getting ingredients out, Azia got distracted by the potential taste of the future frybread. When she started saying things like “Mmmmm that looks so good!” while looking at things like the bowl of flour and a bunch of frying oil Israel was giving her a bad time since the ingredients didn’t look that appetizing to him. She just explained, “But it reminds me of frybread and frybread is soooo good!!!”

 

Once our dough was ready to go, Azia put herself in charge of the shaping each piece and getting it ready to cook. She got better as she went & by the end of our batch she had it about right. The first few she tried were sort of round balls rather than normal looking frybread, but once she incorporated Israel’s tip about remembering to put the hole in the middle they cooked a little more evenly.


This is the recipe we used:


FRYBREAD

• 4 cups flour
• 2 tablespoons baking powder
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 2 cups warm/ hot buttermilk

1. Mix all dry ingredients.
2. Stir the buttermilk. ( I warmed it up in the microwave for a few minutes & it seemed to work.)
3. Mix everything till combined & knead it for a couple minutes.
4. Let the dough sit covered for at least a 30-45 minutes
5. Flatten & stretch a handball sized piece of dough 'till it's a little less than 1/4 inch thick disc. Deep fry.
6. Drain the frybread on some paper towels.

It's a combination of two similar recipes people had given me & then we substituted buttermilk for the buttermilk powder & hot water since we had some I wanted to use up.

All the boys ate it all pretty quickly so it must not have been too bad!