No matter where you are in Lahore, you never are far from a naan dukan. And at each of these diminutive bakeries—found on every street, alley and corner, invariably perched alongside a cluster of food shops that need their services—the rhythm is an almost identical choreography that produces hundreds or more tender, toasted flatbreads an hour, many thousands a day.

In most cases, it’s a four-person operation that begins in a back room. There, the first baker hand-mixes vats of pillowy dough from yeast, water, flour and salt, letting it rise before forming it into tray upon tray of palm-sized balls. Those trays then are delivered to the tandoor room, the main area of the dukan, usually an alcove that sits open to the street. At the center, buried in the floor or counter, a massive urn-shaped gas-fired tandoor oven that emits intense waves of heat.

Naan are to Pakistan what the tortilla is to Mexico, what injera is to Ethiopia. They are ubiquitous, served at most any meal, where they serve as starch and utensil, scooping up rich sauces and chunks of tender meat. Most dukan do nothing but naan (and their less-leavened relative, roti), existing in a delicious symbiosis with nearby food stalls.

But there are exceptions. Pappa Gee Happy Bhai Food Corner, for example. It’s mostly a sprawling collection of tables and cooktops clustered under sheets of corrugated metal in the parking lot of a police station. Owner Nawab Khan has served upward of 2,000 people a day for 35 years, offering all manner of well-spiced family recipes for chickpeas and meats from 6 a.m. until 1 a.m., all accompanied by their own naan baked in their own tandoor right in that same parking lot.

Another exception? While most naan are the sideshow, a few are meals unto themselves. These stuffed naan—sometimes chicken, often potatoes—are one of Happy Bhai’s specialties. Which is what had me camped out at baker Jawaid Ahmed’s tandoor, where he says he cranks out sometimes 1,000 or more naan an hour during the eatery’s busiest blocks.

I opted for the aloo naan, or potato-stuffed. It began the same as standard naan—pillowy dough rolled flat. But then Ahmed mounded in the center a tangle of cilantro, mint, cooked potato chunks, shredded green and red cabbage and ample sliced red chilies. He then stretched the edges of the dough up and over the filling, pleating it closed like a Chinese dumpling.

After he rolled the naan flat again, the process was the same—dimpling, stretching over a pillow, then smacking onto the side of the tandoor. In just a minute or so, the exterior was crisped, the center chewy and studded with tender potatoes, hits of spice, fresh herbs and still-crunchy cabbage. The overall effect was pretty amazing.

Recreating Ahmed’s aloo naan at Milk Street did require a few adjustments, namely that most of us don’t have tandoors handy. But we found the even and intense heat of a cast-iron skillet did a respectable job. We also tinkered with the dough. In Pakistan, it often is prepared early in the day, slowly proofing for many hours in the heat, a process that produces particularly tender results. To speed that up but get similar results in our kitchen, we added a bit of yogurt.

Delicious and true to the original, no 15-hour flight needed.