This week I decided to make hummus and tapenade with tuna for my work-week lunches, and so naturally I needed to make sourdough pitas to go with my dips.
Classic Sourdoughs by Ed Wood
This is my first recipe from my new sourdough book Classic Sourdoughs by Ed Wood, and I have to admit that I found the instructions on culture preparation a bit confusing, especially since I’ve been reading multiple sourdough books and blogs lately, and the instructions in the book are unspecific and non-linear at times. For example, the recipe calls for 2 cups of cold liquid culture, then adds flour and water twice before declaring the culture active, but if I took some of that “fully active” culture and made that my new starter culture, it would have a much lower hydration level than I’m keeping…but if I just take my culture which has been sitting in the fridge for a week and use 2 cups, am I assured that it will be active enough in the specified times? There weren’t any helpful clues about what the dough should look like during each step, so I felt pretty tied to the times listed, and confusion ensued.
The recipe
Ultimately I decided to feed my liquid culture on Friday night, let it become active overnight, and set aside two cups of that for the pitas. After putting those in the fridge for a couple hours (during which the volume shrunk so that I had a little less than two cups, oops!), I added a cup of flour and a quarter cup of water, and started mixing:
Pitas: first mix
I let that sit for twelve hours, during which time it became delightfully bubbly:
Pita dough after first proof: bubbly!
I then repeated the flour and water mix:
Pitas: second mix
And let it sit around for eight hours and get bubbly again:
more bubbles!
First thing sunday morning I added the rest of the flour, plus the sugar, salt and oil, kneaded the dough a bit, and formed it into eight rounds:
soon-to-be-rolled pita rounds
Out of curiosity, I weighed the rounds as I was forming them to see how accurately I had divided the dough, and I was pretty impressed! The first six were all pretty close to 6 ounces each (between 5.5 and 6.5 ounces), and then I made a slightly smaller one and had to adjust a little. Pretty good for eye-balling the dough as I divide it though!
My other point of contention with the recipe came at this point. While I can usually depend on Mr. Wood to not lead me astray, the book directed me to roll the dough into 1/4 inch thick rounds and then “form two stacks with the rounds, separating the rounds with waxed paper or paper towels”. My advice: NO!!!! DON’T STACK THE ROUNDS! Maybe there’s a secret trick that everyone knows but me, or maybe in other places waxed paper and paper towels are made with super-ultra-nonstick substances, or maybe a thick layer of flour between each pita and the waxed paper on top of it is implied, but I personally have nearly lost a batch of naan to an ill-advised waxed paper stack, and when I read that the rounds were to proof for another 90 minutes AND that the rounds should be handled carefully because disruptions to the surface might cause the poofy magic to fail, I suspected that many people have suffered un-poofed pitas due to the stacking instructions, and I felt sad for them. (I layed out parchment paper on sheet pans and heat-safe cutting boards, layed two pitas separated by about four inches on each board, and slid the parchment onto the baking stone right along with the pitas.
When at last the oven was heated and it was time to bake the pitas, I watched the first batch anxiously for signs on poofing – I was quite nervous that all my pitas would be flat, but then after about 3 minutes, the first two pitas started to magically expand:
Poof!
After the first batch I skipped the baking sheet and put the parchment directly on the stone, but there was no difference in the results. The recipe called for a cook time of about five minutes, when the pitas were both poofed and browned. I had poofiness after five minutes, but browning took another five or six. I thought about taking one batch out after only five minutes anyway, but they looked too anemic, so I left them in the oven…maybe it was the wrong day to bake with the convection feature turned off!
Plenty o Poofy Pitas
My crust is crisper than typical pitas, and the pitas don’t deflate into softness when they cool, so I have some concerns about the normalness of the pitas – I have no idea if they’re supposed to be ballooned throughout their lifetime or not. (Two of the eight pitas experienced some poofing failure, possibly from over-handling during the rolling stage – handle your nascent pitas carefully!) They are quite tasty though – we tore into one just before lunch – it was a little bit sour and a little bit chewy (it was a non-poofer). I did a tiny bit of research and found some recently baked pitas at pete-bakes.com, and from Pete’s pictures it looks like perennial poofiness is ok – I’ll take a consensus of one, and call the pitas a success!
