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How to Make Pita Bread
Breadtopia Spawns Breadmania
Thanks Kris for sending this…
My husband says that I have an obsession with the bread-baking thing and have become a bread baking “MANIAC”. The disorder, I guess has been named BreadMania. According to the DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition), LOL, there is no cure!
For the pita, I doubled your plain bread flour KN recipe. it takes quite a bit flour to keep the dough from sticking to the board and rolling pin, but that’s okay; it didn’t seem to harm the texture. This morning I rolled out large ones for stuffing. (Tennis ball size balls.) The nice thing is that they do not need a second proofing and take only about 6-8 min. in a 500 F oven on pre-heated stone. I own several bread books and have made pitas and other breads the old fashioned way, but will never go back.
Tomorrow, I will experiment with whole wheat and rye flour and seeded tops.
“GO PACKERS”
Kris Nickel
And thanks to Madelyn for contributing her “perfect pita” recipe…
I made Pitas over the weekend! They were a lot of fun. I found there is no need for no-knead! LOL! The dough was a lot of fun to work with and very quick to prepare. Probably not as sticky as no-knead (?) but I haven’t tried the no-knead for this because you have to roll the dough out.
In a nutshell I used this recipe
•1 package of yeast, or quick rising yeast
•1 teaspoon granulated sugar
•1/2 cup warm water (no more than 115F)
•3 cups bread flour
•1 1/4 teaspoon salt
•1 cup lukewarm water (no more than 115F)
Other recipes call for a little olive oil so I might try that next time.
Prepare the yeast in the usual way (1st three ingredients), then put everything in my Kitchen Aid with the dough hook and worked the dough until it was coming away from the bowl. Recipe called for a 3 hour first rise to double the volume but mine seemed ready in an hour.
I divided dough into 12 balls. Let them rest for about 15 minutes while you heat up your oven. Then rolled each one flat before putting in the oven. Baked 4 at a time. Mine were small… about 4-5 inches in diameter.
The way I baked them was, my oven is on the blink and the bake setting is not working so I cannot make regular loaves of bread. Pita likes hot oven temperatures so I put my brick pizza stone on the highest shelf and used my broiler set to high to heat things up to around 450 degrees. Shut broiler off before putting the pitas on the hot stone. 4 minutes on 1 side, 2 on the other. You then have to heat the stone and oven back up to do another batch. I was improvising and this method worked.
Note if you brush on olive oil before baking the dough you end up with less of a puff and more of a flat bread. You can still open them up the flatter ones with a fork like an English muffin. My first ones were very puffy, but I tried brushing on olive oil and those didn’t puff up like in the picture above.
I regularly bake no-knead rye bread and keep a rye starter in my fridge, so would be curious about any pita experiments encorporating rye. I went for the white, plain variety as this was my first venture into pita. I don’t think I will ever by pita again as it is hard to find fresh pitas!
How to Make Pita Bread