Averting a Pita Panic

My first attempt at making sourdough pita bread was so successful that I decided to invite the whole family over for a BBQ, where I would impress them with my baking skills. What I didn't count on was getting different results every time I tried making pita bread since then.

Rescue Mission #1: Pita Chips

To prepare for the gathering, I tried a recipe which required less sourdough starter, and used a mix of wholemeal and white flour. I impatiently started baking without waiting for the dough to fully double in size, and also pulled the rounds out of the oven after a shorter amount of time to stop the bread getting dry.

Smaller bubbles that did not join into a pocket.

Not surprisingly, these "pitas" did not rise much, and I wasn't entirely sure whether they were fully cooked.

Not much rising going on here, and the colour didn't look right.

Before giving up altogether, I rolled the final dough ball thinner than usual, let the oven heat for longer, and managed to make a large pita pocket. This would be a good option for someone wanting a lower carb pita sandwich, but the thinner bread did go stale more quickly that the thicker ones I made earlier.

In this batch of dough, thinness worked better.

I sliced up the rest of the bread into triangles, brushed them with olive oil, sprinkled salt and pepper over them, and baked them until golden.

Pita chips made from bread that did not rise well.

These pita chips were a great accompaniment to my homemade hummus!

Pita chips with homemade hummus, garnished with olive oil and sumac.

Rescue Mission #2: Manakish Za'atar or Pizza

Although my bread did not puff up into what I would consider pita, I suspected that I just didn't let the dough rise enough. The results weren't really that bad, and I was sure I could get it right next time. I set about trying to produce more sourdough starter quickly, taking it out of the fridge and letting it sit on the kitchen counter. Unfortunately, I left my starter out too long (well over a day), and after making plenty of bubbles, it seemed to have been taken over by some other organisms. After feeding it a couple of times in blind optimism, it turned into a runny goo with no elasticity, which also didn't smell quite right. It was not going to recover in time for the BBQ, so I turned to Plan B: using store-bought yeast.

The recipe in the New York Times called for 2 teaspoons of yeast, but I only had just over 1 teaspoon left in the cupboard. I figured that wouldn't be a problem, as long as I let the dough rise long enough. I tried rolling it thinner, since that helped last time, but I still ended up with several air pockets rather than one large one, more like naan than pita.

Naan-like bubbles.

Perhaps it was because I rolled the dough out in plenty of flour, taking away the moisture that's needed so the steam can do its work. Perhaps the pizza stone under the baking sheet simply wasn't hot enough yet. In any case, it wasn't working.

I had mixed up some za'atar as we had too much thyme in the garden (though it's probably not the right kind of thyme to use). I sprinkled it now over the dough discs, after brushing them with olive oil.

Bread topped with olive oil and za'atar.

Fresh bread is always delicious anyway, even when just seasoned and brushed with olive oil, but the manakish za'atar was a tasty and novel option.

My manakish za'atar.

By changing the toppings, you could also make some mini pizzas.

Crispy, thin pizzas from pita dough.

Of course, I went and bought more yeast after this trial run - I still intended to make pita bread for people, after all.

Rescue Mission #3: Flour Tortillas

I prepared a lot of dough for our BBQ, just to be on the safe side. Inevitably, there was more of it than people could eat, and our fridge was already full from all the meats and salads that were left over, so the unused mixture sat at room temperature for more than a day. In hindsight, I should have just baked all of it, and put the leftover pitas in the freezer (they defrost easily in the toaster, and will even puff up again if they did so originally). However, when you are entertaining guests, there are other things you want to do with your time.

The excess batch of dough had risen, then deflated, and now smelt rather alcoholic. It was also quite wet, so I added plenty of flour to bring it back to the right consistency. I rolled balls of dough into thin discs to make something like flour tortillas, and cooked them over a hot, dry, cast iron frying pan.

Small bubbles would develop across each round of dough, which is probably when you want to flip it to cook the other side, then transfer it to a plate covered with a tea towel, simultaneously keeping it warm and moist.

Little bubbles on the flatbread.

If you cook it for longer, the small bubbles may join up into a large bubble, essentially giving you pita bread, but then you run the risk of burning part of it, as I did in the video below (fast forward through and the bubble growth looks like magic):

Thin pita pocket in a pan.

These rounds of bread still tasted a little sour and alcoholic, but if you eat them with some flavourful fillings, it's not going to be a problem!

Flatbread with dips and salads: hummus, toum, baba ghanoush, muhammara, tabbouleh and a tomato salad.

Taquitos with refried beans, grated cheese, avocado and tomato salsa.

Other Ideas

I haven't tried these yet, but I imagine you could also easily turn your dough into gözleme, Chinese spring onion pancakes, and the like. Have fun!

Homemade Sourdough Pita Bread

It's funny how one thing leads to another. I was looking for recipes to use up the excess thyme we have in the garden, and came across Bint Rhoda's za'atar bread. From there, it was only a link away from khubiz arabi cooked in a cast iron pan, which inspired me to compare it to pita bread.

My homemade sourdough pita bread.

Susan's pita bread on her Wild Yeast blog looked amazing, seemed pretty simple to make, and used up a lot of sourdough starter, so I decided to go with her recipe. I generally try to follow the instructions carefully, the first time I make something, but I discovered I didn't have quite as much starter as I thought, which meant I ended up only using 320g of it rather than her rather exact 376g.

It became too late for baking, so I put the dough into the fridge, where it sat for 2 days before I had time to do anything with it. To bring it back to the right temperature, I transferred it, in its covered bowl, into a warm water bath in the kitchen sink. Unfortunately, some water got into the bowl, and I hastily patted the dough dry with a paper towel. Fortunately, that was the last of the mishaps I encountered.

I divided the dough into balls, flattened each one to a few millimetres thick, put two or three of them onto a baking sheet, and slid everything onto a pre-heated pizza stone in the oven. It didn't take long before the bread started puffing up!

Dough rolled out into flat rounds.

Starting to puff up.

Bigger bubbles.

Conjoined bubbles.

It was a lot of fun watching the dough rise in the oven, sometimes with multiple bubbles joining up into a giant air pocket. I was worried that it may not be fully cooked through, so left the bread in the oven for a few extra minutes, which made the pitas a little dry.

I used to wonder how bakers got the holes into pita bread. Who knew it would be so simple? You can and should experience the magic too, whether you choose to use supermarket yeast or a sourdough starter!

A pita pocket.

This post is part of Our Growing Edge, a monthly blogging event aimed at inspiring us to try new things. This month, it is hosted by Kerene from The Dream Baker.

Homemade Sourdough Hot Cross Buns

Ever since I was gifted some sourdough starter many months ago, I have kept it barely alive in my fridge, baking the odd bread, and making many more sourdough crumpets than I needed. (If you have ever tried making sourdough before, you will know the starter gets out of hand very quickly, since every time you feed it flour and water, you are doubling its volume.)

Naturally, when Easter rolled around and I thought about baking hot cross buns, I looked around for a sourdough recipe. Apart from needing to use up starter again, you can't buy sourdough hot cross buns in many places, and I was keen to taste them fresh from the oven. It's just as well we have public holidays right now, because they took quite some time to make, but the end results were delicious, if I do so say myself!

Homemade sourdough hot cross buns.

Here are some snaps from the bun making process. I settled on Kresha Faber's recipe on Nourishing Joy, simply because the photo of her creations looked so amazing.

I was lazy and pulled the starter straight out of the fridge, rather than feeding it again to make sure it was at optimum health. It had bubbled out of the jar a couple of days earlier, and I didn't really need twice as much batter again!

Sourdough starter with not as many bubbles as earlier.

The dough was supposed to come out sticky, but mine was getting dry, so I stopped adding flour, and even added a bit of water back in.

Combining the starter with the other ingredients for the dough.

Rather than making 24 hot cross buns of the same type, I divided the dough in half, and replaced the raisins with chocolate bits in one half. The pictures below are of the raisin ones though. Adding the butter made it beautifully soft.

Half of dough, with raisins and fruit peel mixed in.

After a couple of rounds of resting, the dough hadn't grown much, and I was worried that my buns would turn out to be dense bricks. However, I went ahead and shaped the dough into balls and placed them into buttered pans anyway.

Half of dough shaped into 12 balls.

To help the process along, I placed a piece of cling film (dusted with flour) over each tray and let the balls rise in the warmth of our hot water cupboard for 4 hours. They started nudging up against each other.

Dough after 4 hours in the hot water cupboard.

The recipe didn't specify how to make the crosses, so I followed the instructions from another recipe, this time from Paul Hollywood in the Good Food magazine. Unfortunately, I took "about 5 tbsp water" to mean exactly that much, and I ended up with a stiff batter that was very difficult to pipe. The crosses also came out quite hard after baking.

Buns piped with crosses.

The bread came out of the oven with a golden crust, looking a bit dry...

Hot cross buns after baking.

... but brushing on the glaze (I had no orange juice, so just thinned honey with a little bit of water) caused the crust make crackling noises and look a whole lot more appealing.

Hot cross buns after glazing.

I am used to supermarket hot cross buns being completely soft, but I enjoyed my own flavourful rolls with a crackly crust more, especially when hot and fresh. The bread was soft on the inside, and beautifully fragrant with lashings of butter.

Enjoying my hot cross buns.

This recipe made quite a few buns, so even though I gave half away, I may have to turn the rest into bread and butter pudding when they get stale. If you didn't want the buns to stick together, you would need to leave more space between them, so you could consider halving all the ingredients. To make them even better, I would be tempted to try using a more custardy recipe for the crosses next time, like in Ima's ones. Having said that, my first batch of hot cross buns exceeded my expectations anyway!

This post is part of Our Growing Edge, a monthly blogging event aimed at inspiring us to try new things. This month, it is hosted by Nikki from Everyday Life Mom.

Secret Sandwiches of Shame

I was going to title this post "A Winter Wedding Fail", but there was in fact nothing wrong with the wedding we were invited to—we just never made it there due to my own stupidity.

Maybe I should start at the beginning. Two things happened at roughly the same time recently: a workmate gave me some sourdough starter made from whole spelt and pineapple juice, and a couple of other friends invited me to witness their exchange of vows, for which we were asked to bring some finger food, instead of a gift. I thought I could work those two events together, by baking my first sourdough ever.

Because you can't just have bread on its own, and I wanted something that looked and tasted good as well, while more or less sticking to the basics, I decided I was going to make this amazing-looking hollowed out loaf, secretly stashed full of egg sandwiches inside.

Gorgeous sandwich loaf from The Telegraph.

To make it really stand out and show that I had put some effort into it, I would decorate it with some baked dough shapes too, a la korovai from Ukrainian weddings (though the couple had nothing to do with Ukraine). These figurines apparently need at least a day to dry out, so I started work on them straight away. The bread, on the other hand, I wanted absolutely fresh.

I went with Suburban Grandma's recipe, as she shows you how to make the traditional shapes. It produced a dry mixture, and I added more water, before I had tried to fully incorporate all the ingredients together. I turned it into a beautifully smooth and pliable dough, before I realised that this was completely wrong. My birds couldn't hold their heads up, ended up with flat undersides, and I needed to prop up the one with spread wings. I imagine if I had stuck to the recipe, it would have been easier to shape, like Play-Doh. Perhaps it would have been more difficult to stick the wings to the birds though.

Birds made from soft dough.

I let these shapes dry in a pre-heated oven and turned the oven off while I did errands. When I came back, I remembered to glaze them with egg white, and baked them till the edges were browning. I watched over them and covered up the wing tips with foil when it looked like they were darkening too quickly. I was quite pleased with the results, though the skin on the birds cracked, and some parts looked greyish rather than golden. I pushed toothpicks into each piece while warm. Not bad for a first attempt.

My dough birds and rings, resting on shot glassees.

At this point, my other half pointed out that I was going to great lengths for very little gain, and was I sure the ceremony would be on Sunday? Yes, I thought—I had just checked my calendar yesterday, and the event was definitely in the rightmost column.

Then it was time for bread-making. I had already mixed together the "sponge" (I still think of cake when I hear this word in terms of baking), when I realised that a) egg sandwiches are normally made with the most boring soft white bread, and might not go with sourdough, b) that amount of dough was not going to turn into a large enough loaf for me to place more than a couple of sandwiches inside, and I didn't have enough starter to make more, not to mention that c) as I had never made sourdough before, this could well be a disaster.

Bubbling sourdough sponge.

I immediately put together a double-sized batch of a tried-and-true no-knead bread recipe instead. It was wetter than I remembered it to be, but I didn't put in too much extra flour, as it's supposed to be on the sticky side. I left it overnight, hoping it would get better, but there was a distinct lack of magic here. After sprinkling flour over the mixture, turning it out onto a floured surface, and repeating the process a few more times (while trying not to squeeze all the air bubbles out), the dough still threatened to slowly escape.

Bread dough spreading.

I decided that the only way to make a bread with any height would be to bake it straight after I tuck the edges to the bottom, before it had any time to flatten out. And to avoid any dripping in the oven, I swapped to using a roasting tray rather than a baking sheet. I wrapped the ball around itself a few more times, popping the giant air pockets that developed from the exercise, and slashed the top of the loaf before baking.

My loaf before baking.

You will not believe the pain this bread brought me, literally. I had previously baked this in a covered Pyrex bowl. But with twice the amount of dough now, this was no longer possible. Instead, I opted to pour boiling water into the bottom of the oven tray to generate steam. It may come as a surprise to you, but steam hurts. My hand holding the vessel of water pulled back involuntarily, splashing boiling liquid onto my leg and the floor. I ignored the burning and tried again, this time not caring if I hit the bread.

Loaf after baking.

The end result was beautiful, if I may say it myself—at least, when viewed from the top. The bottom of the bread was unfortunately a bit wet, with damp flour caked to the bottom, no doubt because of the water I had thrown in for steam. I turned the loaf upside down, and baked for a bit longer.

The underside of the bread was caked with excess flour and slightly damp.

The trouble was, it was already the morning of the wedding, and I had not allowed for enough cooling time after the extended baking time. I quickly roped in an extra pair of hands to help make the egg filling, while I fanned the bread and attempted to cut it while slightly warm.

Making of the egg filling.

Carving sandwich slices out of the innards of a loaf is not as easy as you might think, especially when it is round. You end up with mismatched lengths of bread, and there is no easy way to detach your slices from the bottom of the shell, so every piece is left with ripped edges. We were in a hurry though, so didn't have time to worry about aesthetics.

Egg sandwiches in my homemade loaf of bread.

I quickly let the bride know we were running late, put the loaf lid on, arranged my figurines on top, and jumped in the car. It wasn't until nearly an hour later, when we arrived at the venue with no cellphone coverage, that we saw the empty parking lot and realised the terrible truth—we had completely missed the ceremony, and not just by a little bit.

Final result.

This was no laughing matter, but what was there left to do? We sat at the beach and ate a couple of sandwiches before driving sadly and incredulously back home.

This post is part of Our Growing Edge, a monthly blogging event aimed at inspiring us to try new things. This month, it is hosted by Ash from Organic Ash.