Monday, September 5, 2011

The Bread Project Week 11: Pitas (and failing)

Pitas are awesome!

...I guess I should say more than that though.

For a while there I always had some (store-bought ones) on hand. If not for sandwiches, then to toast them up to eat with hummus. So it was natural that I'd want to make my own. As it happened, I ended up making two batches: one from The Bread Bible, the other from A Bread A Day, which is an old site, but I may have to start reading through it for more ideas. Daily bread would be lovely, if only there were another three or four hours in a day.

Anyway, neither ended up being traditional pocket pitas, but I'm pretty sure that was my fault. They were still delicious though, and went well with falafel, which I made myself (did you know you could do that??), adapting a recipe from from another Bread a Day post.




Recipe #1: The Bread Bible Pitas

I picked this recipe because she said you could keep the dough in the fridge for up to three days, and I'd hoping some kind of sourdough-ness would develop. That didn't happen. Oh well.

The dough came together fairly easily but was very wet. When I attempted to roll it out, all it did was stick to my rolling pin. I read through the recipe again for ideas and noticed she mentioned how similar it was to her pizza dough, so I just stretched it out with my fingers. So much fail in that idea- the width was uneven, and while it did puff up a bit the thin sections prevented it from reaching its full potential. It's very good for pita pizzas though.


Recipe #2: Whole Wheat Pitas from A Bread A Day

This was a dryer dough that came together easily. I actually adapted it slightly- she let her sponge sit for four hours, I adjusted the starting flour amounts a bit, nixed the early dose of honey (just added it a bit later) and let it sit in my fridge while I was at work. These rolled out a lot easier but again didn't puff. I'm assuming my dough was too dry?

Will definitely be trying these again, I'm a big fan of the quick cooking times for both recipes.

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