White Chick Tacos for Navajos

I married into the Navajo culture, but I had some familiarity with Native American culture before that. My mom used to make Navajo tacos when I was a kid and I loved to eat the leftover frybread with butter and sugar on it. After I got married, I found out that what my mom made was more like scones.  Scones usually use yeast and are more dessert-like in taste. Frybread uses baking powder (no yeast) and has a more salt and flour taste. Now that I've had the real thing, there's no going back.

I tried for years how to make decent frybread. It was a good dozen years into my marriage before a Navajo friend walked me through it, step by step. She helped me understand the way the dough should feel and how much of it is technique more than recipe. My frybread finally tasted great, but I couldn't get the shape right.

A piece of Navajo frybread is often as big or bigger than your plate. It looks beautifully circular and uniform in thickness. Navajos aren't the only tribe to make frybread. Pretty much every tribe has its own version and I remember a near-riot at a small powwow in Salt Lake City when some Sho-Ban (Shoshone-Bannock) women were selling frybread. Their version is called bannock and it's closer to a sopapilla than Navajo frybread. Things got ugly fast. White chick frybread is my specialty and it can come in all shapes and sizes. Lumpy and bumpy, oblong and even square at times, don't be surprised if you get a piece with a hole (or two or three) in it.

It's not that I CAN'T make it look good. I could use a rolling pin to make it nicer and more uniform, but that just seems like cheating. The great frybread makers are called "slappers" since they slap the dough back and forth from hand to hand. It's a lot like tossing pizza dough. During this process, the dough smooths out and stretches out. Instead of being a slapper, I am a dropper. Gifted with no real coordination, I seem to have no ability to get the dough from one hand to the other without hitting the floor first.

Around this part of the country, we run into Navajo taco or Indian taco booths at every festival or fair. If we don't see a Navajo back there cooking, we usually pass them up. There's a definite difference in taste.  Taco toppings have become more uniform, but on the rez (the reservation), you're more likely to get beans instead of chile with beans. For the frybread on its own, Navajos like it with salt while the non-Natives tend to go for the honey butter.

I was always fine with my White Chick frybread and tacos until today. My baby boy (okay, he's 19 and not a baby anymore) just outdid me. That is some amazing frybread made by real Navajo hands. So beautiful it just brings tears to my eyes.