Questions and Answers: How to Make Fry Bread?
Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an e-newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders offers a Q&A with a rural thinker, maker or doer. Do you like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and get more conversations like this delivered to your inbox every week.
This conversation is part of the first episode of Rural Food Traditions, a podcast on the Rural Remix podcast feed. We start where many meals from various food traditions begin: with bread.
For this conversation, I spoke with Nico Albert Williams about fry bread. Williams is a chef, caterer and student of traditional Native cuisines based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She began her culinary education growing up in California, Arizona, spending time in her mother’s garden and in the kitchen preparing family meals. After moving to northeastern Oklahoma, Williams viewed returning to the homeland of her mother’s people after her move as a calling and an opportunity to reestablish a relationship with her Cherokee community. She did this above all through the language of food.
At the end of this article, check out Williams’ frybread recipe.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Teresa Collins, The Daily Yonder: Hi, Nico. Thank you so much for joining us on the Rural Remix podcast to talk about rural food traditions around bread making. If you don’t mind getting started, tell us where you live, what you do.
Nico Albert Williams: I live in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I am the Executive Director and Founder of Burning Cedar Sovereign Wellness. We are an intertribal community wellness center in Tulsa. Our goal is to provide access to the indigenous community in our urban area to traditional healing methods and traditional foods, and just to provide a space where we can all come together and have activities and things like that. So it’s my daily life, and I’m a chef by trade, so I study, I teach and I cook traditional indigenous dishes.
When we cook food that connects us to culture, there is also an element of emotional, spiritual and mental health, and just being in community and having a relationship with where your food comes from food, if you actually get into the earth and dig or forage for food, take walks and spend time in nature, understand the seasons and be part of the ecosystem.

Part of colonization has been the removal of our food systems and the physical removal of our lands, but also the spiritual removal of our lands. And so reconnecting in that way is something that heals us on all these different levels.
DY: Tell us about fry bread. Can you tell us the history of frybread and why it is controversial?
NO: Fry bread is in some ways a representation of our withdrawal from our traditional food systems. This is a direct consequence of that. So, before (European) contact, our ancestors were completely immersed in the natural world. They were part of the ecosystem and everything they had to survive came from nature and their relationship with the land. So it was a very healthy lifestyle. It was an extremely diverse diet. It was a largely plant-based diet, and it had a very good relationship with the world in the way they took care of the land.
During colonization, they were systematically excluded from access to these lands, to varying degrees depending on the community. But I will speak specifically to the Cherokee experience. We were eventually forced to move to reservation land in Oklahoma, along the Trail of Tears, due to the Indian Removal Act. This meant we no longer had access to a wide range of foods. We were placed in a very small area compared to the entire southern Appalachians that we had access to. And we were given land that wasn’t necessarily meant to be cultivated for our specific crops, and that didn’t have the biodiversity of species that we had in Appalachia. Much of our population lost their lives along this route of travel, but even with the survivors who made it to Oklahoma, the number of people per square mile was still higher than before.
And so all of these things led to a huge disruption to our food system, and ultimately a reliance on the federal government for food subsidies in the form of staple foods and rations. These rations consisted of bleached white flour, refined lard, refined sugar, coffee, canned meats, canned vegetables, things like that. They have been designed to be shelf stable. They were designed to keep us alive, but they were not designed to keep us healthy.
DY: None of these were part of the natural diet.
NO: No. Every ingredient they gave us were things that our bodies had never experienced before and were not part of our diet. This is a radical change that has occurred within a generation or two. So it was a drastic change for our people to depend on these foods that were completely devoid of nutrients.
Fry bread was a subsistence food, a survival food. And so, even though it comes from a place of hardship over generations, this food makes its way into our traditions and our families, and it becomes a beloved food. I mean, there’s no denying that fried dough is delicious. Everyone agrees, and every culture has their version of fry bread and donuts and all these different things, and they’re all delicious.
In these other cultures, we think of donuts or donuts or something like that. This fried dough is intended as a treat or snack, it is not meant to make up the whole or half of the meal. But that’s where we found ourselves. These foods, while very delicious, are not nutritious and are not supposed to be the basis of a meal, but that is what they have ended up being because of our situation.
That being said, while we know they have caused a lot of health problems in Indian Country, we have a lot of health disparities, like higher rates of diabetes, higher rates of heart disease and d obesity, all linked to our disruption of the healthcare system. food systems and the introduction of these foods and the dependence on these foods like fried bread. We always form an emotional attachment to these foods. Fry bread is a beloved part of the table for Cherokee families and Native families throughout Indian Territory who all had the same experience of creating this dish as something our ancestors prepared so that we could survive.
And it has made its way over the years until it is now part of every ceremony, every gathering. When we gather for our celebrations throughout the year, it always has a place at the table because people love it and because we have built this relationship with this food over the years.
DY: That’s true. So it seemed more of a sign of defiance and resilience.
NO: This is how we see things. These are the ingredients that were thrust upon us, and our ancestors had the ingenuity to take these things and make something truly comforting with them. And that certainly represents difficulties, but it also represents resilience. And so one of the reasons why we are here today, why I am here today, is that my ancestors were able to survive on the very little that they were given. It is in this context that we try to consider fried bread.
Fried bread recipe:
Ingredients:
4 cups self-rising flour, plus excess to form loaves
1 ½ cups hot water
½ cup cold buttermilk or water
Canola oil, vegetable oil or shortening for frying
Instructions:
Place the flour in a medium sized bowl and make a well in the center. Add hot water all at once and stir with your hands until almost all the flour is absorbed and a dough begins to come together.
Add cold buttermilk or water until all remaining flour is absorbed and a soft, sticky dough/dough forms. Cover the dough with a clean, damp cloth or paper towel and let rest for AT LEAST 30 minutes.
Fill a large cast iron skillet or Dutch oven about 3/4 full with your cooking oil of choice, place over medium-high heat. Heat the oil until it reaches about 350°F. Prepare a clean dish or bowl with 2-3 cups of flour, to distribute the loaves.
Divide the dough into approximately 1/3 cup portions, one at a time, and place it in the pile of loose flour. Dust all sides of each dough ball with flour and use your hands to roll out the dough into a 1″ thick patty, taking care not to overwork the dough.
Carefully slide the buns into the hot oil and let them cook until golden brown on the bottom. Use tongs or a fork to turn the bread and cook until golden brown on the reverse side. Transfer the cooked bread to a tray, bowl or basket lined with paper towels, newspaper, paper bags or a clean cloth to absorb any excess grease. Repeat with remaining dough.

This interview first appeared in Pathfinders, a weekly email newsletter from The Daily Yonder. Every Monday, Path Finders offers a Q&A with a rural thinker, maker or doer. Join the mailing list today to receive these insightful conversations straight to your inbox.
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