AI photoFlatbread with Hummus and Aubergine
Soft homemade flatbread served with creamy hummus, pan-fried aubergine, quick-pickled vegetables, feta and a kick of sriracha.
Labels are worked out automatically from the ingredients and can be wrong. Check the packaging if it matters to you.
Ingredients
- 15 g Yeast
- 400 g Water
- 550 g Plain flour
- 1 tsp Salt
- 1 tsp Caster sugar
- 2 tbsp Olive oil
- 1 tbsp Tahini
- 2 tbsp Lemon juice
- 1 can Chickpeas drained and rinsed
- 2 clove Garlic
- 1 tsp Cumin
- 1 pinch Cayenne pepper a pinch
- 50 ml Water
- 3 tbsp Olive oil
- Salt
- Black pepper fresh
- 150 ml Water
- 200 ml Apple cider vinegar
- 50 g Caster sugar
- Salt
- Black pepper fresh
- 2 pcs Red onion sliced into rings
- 2 pcs Bell pepper cut into thin strips
- 1 pcs Aubergine diced
- Salt
- 100 ml Olive oil
- 70 g Rocket
- 100 g Feta crumbled
- 1 tbsp Sriracha
Steps
Mix the yeast into the water in a bowl.
Add the salt, sugar and plain flour, and knead in a mixer on medium speed for about 10 minutes.
10 minTransfer the dough to an oiled bowl and let it rise on the worktop for 30 minutes, then refrigerate for 10–18 hours.
Divide the dough into the number of portions needed and shape into balls.
Lightly oil the worktop and roll each ball into a flatbread about 2 mm thick.
Heat a frying pan over medium heat and cook the breads for a few minutes on each side, until soft and puffed.
Put the tahini and lemon juice in a blender and blitz for 1 minute.
1 minAdd the remaining hummus ingredients and blitz for another minute.
1 minIf you like, add an ice cube to make the hummus extra creamy. Add a little more cold water if needed for the right consistency. Season with lemon, oil, salt and pepper to taste.
Bring water to the boil in a pan, add the apple cider vinegar, sugar, salt and pepper, and stir until the sugar dissolves.
Add the onion and peppers, spoon into jars and let cool completely.
Mix the aubergine with salt in a bowl and let it stand for 30 minutes to draw out moisture.
30 minPat the aubergine dry.
Pour the oil into a frying pan and heat it slightly above medium; the oil should be hot enough that the aubergine sizzles when added.
Fry the aubergine cubes in the pan, stirring constantly, until they develop a nice crust. You may need to add a little more oil.
Transfer the aubergine cubes to a plate lined with kitchen paper to absorb the fat.
Serve the flatbread with hummus, fried aubergine, pickled vegetables, feta and sriracha sauce.
This is four separate small projects that meet on one plate: a bread that's basically pizza dough left to sulk in the fridge overnight, a hummus that lives or dies by how long you blitz it, a quick pickle that buys you crunch and acid against all that oil, and aubergine fried hard enough to actually taste of something. None of it is difficult. What decides whether it works is patience in exactly two places — the dough's cold rise, and the aubergine's salting — and everybody wants to skip both.
The dough is just flour, water, yeast, a whisper of sugar and salt. Some say you need a long autolyse or a sourdough starter for "real" flatbread — no, because this isn't trying to be a boule, it's trying to puff and blister in a hot pan in under five minutes, and strong yeast plus an overnight fridge rest does that job fine. The fridge time isn't about flavour development the way people talk about with pizza (though you get some) — it's about control. A dough that's rested and cold handles like leather, not like a wet balloon, so when you roll it to 2mm it stays 2mm instead of springing back to 5.
Salting the aubergine for half an hour isn't superstition, it's drainage. Aubergine flesh is a sponge of air pockets, and those pockets will fill with hot oil the second you fry it — that's the actual mechanism behind "aubergine drinks oil like nothing else." Salt draws water out by osmosis, the cubes slump and bead with moisture, you pat them properly dry, and now there's less internal space for oil to flood into. Some say the salting is to remove bitterness — modern aubergines barely have any, that myth is left over from varieties nobody grows anymore. Skip the salting and you'll fry a panful of oil with aubergine suspended in it.
Fry it in oil hot enough that a cube sizzles the instant it touches down, and don't walk away — stir it properly, don't just flip it twice, because you want a crust on more than one face. A proper kazan would let you fry in a deep well of oil with heat coming from the sides and bottom at once; your frying pan on a domestic hob only gives you heat from below, so the oil pools thin and the cubes need your hand moving them constantly or one face burns while the other steams. That's not a lesser method, it's just a different machine, and you work with the one you've got.
On the flour: 550g of plain flour is doing a job strong bread flour would do better — more gluten, better puff — but plain flour is what's in most UK cupboards and it works, just handle the dough a touch more gently when rolling since it's less elastic. If you've only got self-raising, don't use it here; the raising agent fights the yeast and you lose the chew.
Tahini: any smooth sesame paste works, the only real failure point is a jar that's separated into a layer of oil floating over sludge — stir it hard before you measure, or your hummus comes out either greasy or dry depending which layer you spooned from.
Oil for frying the aubergine should have no flavour of its own that you don't want fighting the pepper and cumin already in the hummus — a neutral vegetable or sunflower oil does this, olive oil works too if you don't mind its taste coming through, but a cold-pressed "extra virgin for finishing" oil is wasted here, save it for drizzling at the end instead.
Feta: buy the block in brine, not the pre-crumbled bags, which dry out and turn chalky sitting in the fridge — a squeeze of brined feta against the vinegar pickle is the point, and pre-crumbled loses exactly that squeeze. If you can't get feta, a firm salted sheep's or goat's cheese does the same job: sharp, salty, crumbly against soft hummus.
And the sriracha at the end — that's not tradition, that's just heat and vinegar for contrast, so any chilli sauce with some acid in it substitutes fine. Don't treat any of this as fixed. The dough, the pickle, the hummus — none of them care what you call the dish, they only care whether you gave the aubergine its thirty minutes and the dough its night in the fridge.