I’ve been playing around with wrap / roti / nan options in the lead up to Plastic Free July, as for lunchboxes which Seb really likes wraps at the moment, it’s something we consistently buy, wrapped in plastic and Plastic Free July has a funny way of calling you to gently consider upping the ante each year. So here we are. I wanted to do one with a sweet potato base to help parents expand veggie vocab in fussy peeps and so that it wasn’t all flour. I’ve got a couple more I’ll be rolling out (pardon the pun – didn’t even plan it!) over the month but I want to share my most flexible-use one first as it’s just a bit yummy.
At first, I thought “I wonder if you could roll out gnocchi dough and fry it. You can, but I wanted something the maximum amount of people could enjoy and a lot of play centres and schools have to have egg policies sadly, which is a whole other topic, so how would upping the ‘wetness’ go from sweet potato to be able to ditch the egg go? And could you do orange OR purple sweet potatoes?
A couple of mini-trials later and we got there and the best part about it is that is is just the easiest recipe ever to remember: 1:1 mashed warm sweet potato to flour.
This works as a gluten-free roti or nan to BYO to the local Indian or enjoy curries at home like the simple fish curry or chicken spinach curry or ‘set and forget’ lamb saga on the blog. It develops those little ‘blisters’ and a little flakiness when served fresh and hot, to give you an “I can’t believe it’s not gluten-containing roti” vibe.
It also works fine stored in the fridge and used as a wrap for school lunches, as a simple vehicle for an egg and avocado roll for breakky or for a corn- free soft taco option if you have to avoid corn.
The options are endless and I hope you love them as much as we do. Remember the first time you make anything fiddly like this, it’s not the easiest thing. That’s the problem is we often don’t allow ourselves to become proficient and find it easy – we usually abandon with ‘well that was hard, I’m never doing that again’. The second time I made these I felt it was super easy. The third time I was like “How awesome is this!” Let yourself be the same.
I can’t wait to see your pics on Insta – feel free to tag me @lowtoxlife so I can share across to our stories and inspire others to get making their pwn flatbreads and reduce plastic even more!
Real food. Healthy People. Happy Planet.
Equipment
- non-stick cast iron pan or ceramic non-stick pan
- Rolling Pin
- big chopping board or a marble/granite benchtop for rolling
Ingredients
- 1 cup sweet potato mashed, either orange or purple both work
- 1 cup gluten-free flour or ½ cup buckwheat flour, ¼ cup tapioca flour and ¼ cup almond meal
- ⅓ cup gluten-free flour for dusting and rolling out the flatbreads
- ¼ tsp salt
- olive oil coconut oil or ghee for frying pan
Instructions
- Boil 1 medium sweet potato whole with the skin on, in a saucepan.
- Once it is tender to fork into the middle, remove from the boiling water and cool a little but you still want it to be very warm when it comes to mashing it and making the flour. So about 5 minutes so that it's not super hot to remove the skin.
- Carefully peel off all of the skin and cut off any rough endy bits or bumps.
- Mash the sweet potato.
- Measure out a cup of mashed sweet potato - if you have enough for two cups consider double batching and freezing a few little balls for a later deliciousness!
- Pop 1 cup of the GF flour mix you're using and the 1 cup of warm mashed sweet potato into a bowl, adding the salt if you're using.
- Get messy and mix it together until JUST mixed. If you overwork it, it can make it a little dry. If it is super sticky at this stage for whatever reason and feels too 'wet' and mashy, add another tablespoon flour to the mix and incorporate until it feels like a super light dough.
- Preheat a frying pan to high with a tsp olive oil or ghee. When it reaches a little smoke point, reduce it to medium heat, ready for frying. If you have two great low tox non stick pans, I use two pans for this recipe so that I can go a bit faster! Add a teaspoon of chosen oil each time.
- Now break off roughly equal parts of the dough into 3 cm diameter balls and dust them so they have a flour coating and are ready to roll.
- Oil your rolling pin and roll out a ball once one way, once turning the disc 90 degrees and rolling it out the other way and then roll out until it's about 2-3 mm thick and whatever size you can manage to pick up and pop into pan (I do a soft taco size if you can picture that, about 15cm diameter) I use a big wide metal flat spatula to pick up and plop down onto the pan's surface.
- Pop it on to cook, 1 minute per side, 2 side flips each, and get onto rolling out the next one ready to go! As each is cooked store it in a tea towel inside a bowl to keep from drying out or getting cold. I like to also keep this in a low 100C oven as long as it's not got open flames and NOT touching element. Please be careful.
- Keep doing this until you've cooked them all. Voila! The first time will feel fiddly and the second time will feel MUCH more fluent, I promise.
- Serve with curry, soup, middle eastern spread of hummus and falafel, cool and keep in fridge to use as a wrap over a couple of days or do as I did this morning, reheat and serve with a fried egg and wilted spinach for breakky.
Notes
BATCH Make a double or triple batch and freeze either the raw balls in a container or the finished flatbread separated by baking paper so they don’t stick together.
FRIDGE You can refrigerate cooked ones and use over the next two days. A quick reheat on a pan a few seconds per side or cold as a wrap. Either way works.
FREEZER You can freeze the balls of ‘dough’ and defrost and roll out + cook at a later date – hooray! When you defrost them, I find they need a half teaspoon of flour added to them before dusting to roll. To freeze them, roll them and dust them with flour, then arrange them into a glass container and freeze. Defrost overnight in the fridge or on the countertop for an hour before dusting and rolling out to cook.
PRO TIP Using the cold mash makes the flatbread/nan/roti dry as sweet potato when cooked, then cooked forms more starch. Using warm sweet potato when you’re making the dough seems key to a yummy result.
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About the Author: Alexx Stuart
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love these my favourite GF wrap
So great to hear Peta!