Making Pita Bread with Artisan Dough

I finally tried the pita bread from my Artisan Bread cookbook. (Don't forget to enter the giveaway!) It was a success! Though not nearly as perfect and beautiful as the photos, (yet!) John raved about it and said it was exactly what he was hoping for! Yes!

You can check out the tutorial on the Artisan Bread website here, where it turns out perfect and beautiful, or you can see how it turns out here in real life on a trial run!

My prepped work space.

Note my monstrous dough tub. It's rather a burden on my already-bursting fridge.

I'm hoping to get some from Amazon like this soon:

...although, $21.99 for two plastic tubs seems spendy to me...

I've looked into other options and found cheaper, but not knowing if they're long-term food-safe and such, I think I will go with these, which are particularly recommended for uses such as dough-keeping.

Gotta pile up those Swagbucks! :-)

Start with a smallish blop of dough...

You can make them bigger, but since my "pizza peel" is the bamboo cutting board pictured, I have limited space, so I kept 'em little.

Since they only take about 7 minutes to bake anyway, it's not a big deal to do several.

Roll and stretch it out as thin as you can...the recipe says 1/8th inch.

I'm not sure how this is humanly possible.

The recipe says if you have trouble with it bouncing back to just let it sit for a bit and the dough will relax...I should experiment more with that next time.

I also think a heavier rolling pin would be useful.

Like that lovely marble one my mama has...

Slide it onto your hot baking stone, (have it heating at 500 degrees for 20 minutes before you start the rolling out process.)

And bake for 7-8 minutes until very lightly browned.

As you can see mine looks much different than theirs at this point...

But mine still managed to taste good, and I have plenty of chances to practice!


UPDATE: Mine DOES look like theirs now!

Wrap it in a kitchen towel as soon as you take it out of the oven to keep the pita soft and deflated.

My little stack of softening pitas!

I loved how easy and quick these were to make! Since they are the sort of thing that is best eaten very fresh, it's especially wonderful to be able to whip 'em out so quickly. You could have a couple nice little pitas ready just a little more than a half hour after the mood strikes you (or your husband.)

I made them again the very next day and we've been eating them off and on ever since!

I filled a fresh one with tuna for my lunch the other day...delish!

I also want to point out that, although you may not have all the perfect, recommended equipment, you can still pull off a very satisfactory result! Don't let the lack of an ideal dough tub, pizza peel or rolling pin to stop you!

Sometimes I paralyze myself from trying new things because I don't have the perfect or ideal equipment and circumstances to do it exactly as "they" did. More and more, I am purposing to not let this stop me from being adventurous! Don't let it stop you!