Thursday, April 8, 2010

Pita: Five-Minute Magic

Pita

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.)

IMG_4368

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

Pita-size dough lump

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.

Ready for the oven

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.)

Future pita on baking stone

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

Ooh, look! It's puffing up!

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.

Puffy pita

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.

6 comments:

  1. I've only made pita once, but I thought it was one of the most fun things I've ever baked. Your photos are totally making me want to do it again.

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  2. On today's rainy day, we are definitely doing this....thank you.

    The funny thing is that I just read in "the gift of an ordinary day" of how much her children remember of baking bread when they were younger. SO, this is awesome.

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  3. Very cool! Good bread and a little magic too!

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  4. Oooo, Laura I just got this book from the library and now I really want to make pita bread. They look wonderful!

    Annie

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  5. I looove pita! Yours look so tasty!

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  6. Thanks for this! I tucked away the inspiration for a few weeks and pulled it out tonight. I do ABin5, but hadn't had the guts to try pita. SO easy! SO yummy! Thank you!

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