Pita: Five-Minute Magic

You know what I love about making pita bread with the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day method? It literally takes five minutes to bake. OK, that's assuming you already have dough in your fridge, and your oven is preheated to 500 degrees already, and you've already rolled out your little pita rounds. But seriously! They bake in five minutes! And it really is kind of like magic.

First, preheat the oven to 500 degrees, with a baking stone set on a rack in the middle of the oven.

Now pull your dough out of the fridge. If you already are using the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day method, then most likely you have some kind of dough in there already. So far I have tried a good half-dozen different dough recipes for pita, and the only one I found that did not work was the olive oil-enriched whole wheat from Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day. If you have the basic recipe from either book, or a close variation (like European peasant bread, for example), it should work fine.

Dust your pizza peel with whole wheat flour. (It provides the best stick-prevention.)



Dust your rolling surface with whatever kind of flour you like, and grab a plum-sized hunk of dough.



Roll it out with a rolling pin on your floured surface until it is about 1/8 inch thick. It needs to be pretty darn thin in order to puff properly. Carefully transfer to your pizza peel, and repeat until you've run out of space on your peel.



Now you're going to very carefully slide your pita circles onto the hot baking stone. Don't burn yourself! (I say that because I burn myself nearly every time.)



Now shut the oven door and wait five minutes. If you peek after two or three minutes, you should see this:



Exciting, isn't it? When they're puffed and browned (roughly 5 to 7 minutes), use the pizza peel to slide them back out of the oven.



Aren't they lovely? We had them with our Persian sloppy joes last night, and they were about 1000% better than the pita you can buy in the grocery store. Five minutes! Love it.