Pita Bread

So I’ve definitely struggled with what I can make to help us get through the week for lunches while at work. In the past I’ve done tortillas, loaf bread, and sandwich bread rolls. D suggested I could make pitas. So I looked up some recipes and in true me fashion tweaked it to create my own version of things.

Ingredients:

1 cup warm water
2 tsp yeast
1 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1 Tbsp sugar
1 cup whole wheat flour
1.5 cup all-purpose flour

I started by adding the yeast and sugar into the water and letting it sit for about 5 minutes. Then I proceeded to make a poolish with the water/yeast/sugar and whole wheat flour. I mixed this up thoroughly and let it sit for about 10-15 minutes.

You can see that it is a pretty wet mixture. To the poolish I added the olive oil and the AP flour. This dough is less water % than many of my breads so came together fairly easily and I hand kneaded for about 5-8 minutes. I formed the dough into a ball and coated it with olive oil and let it rest for about 1.5 hours.

After the dough doubled in size, I punched down the dough and deflated it. The dough was then divided into 8 balls.

Each ball was then placed on a floured surface and a rolling-pin was used to roll out the dough into about a 6-8″ disc shape. I had read that there are two different ways to cook pitas. The oven method creates a great “puff” but the downside is that you don’t get the nice brown spots from the stove top method. I elected to try both to see which one I felt was better. I didn’t get the nice separation of the pita as I expected with the stove top method. I used a cast iron pan for stovetop. The oven I had at 450 F and a baking sheet (pre-heated).