Made Beer-B-Q's Pita Bread

 

CLICK HERE for the recipe and keep reading for some great tips on making these.

 

Since to me Pita bread should always be white flour, I skipped the whole wheat part and made it all white flour bread- no worries. Those of you who think that's not healthy...well a proper pita should be filled with a fresh greasy felafel and oily hummous paste or grease-dripping lamb slathered in a sour cream with feta cheese chunks. So there.

 

Started out with the honey (got this delicious stuff from an exchange with 3Montes) and the warm water to proof-

 

After proofing, mixed 5 cups white flour, 1 TSP salt with the proof mix slowly mixed into an indention in the flour-

 

Kneaded it properly as the instructions stated. About 10 minutes-

 

Into an oiled bowl it went to rise. I put it near the woodstove, covered in a cotton dishtowel-

 

After 3 hours it had risen to double and here we go!-

 

Rolled it out into a rope and tore it into about 12 uniform pieces. Each one got softly kneaded into a ball and rolled into shape in my hands-

 

Then I covered them in a towel to rest for 10 minutes as I preheated oven and baking sheets to 500 F.

 

I gently rolled out the first two. The plan was to make them in two's, one per sheet at the bottom rack. I was worried I didn't do the first ones properly, they seemed a bit thick, but I had no idea what was necessary to make the "hollow" in the middle.

 

I remember the stories my dad used to tell me when he worked at Franco-American Bakery in downtown New Orleans after WW2. He drove a delivery truck for them and used to watch the swarthy Italians manhandle the several hundred-pound wads of dough in the basement. Pouring sweat in the heat, shirtless, they would use their arms, chests and shoulders to lift, roll and toss these slabs of dough aorund before cutting them into loaves and they used to tell him that one had to manhandle the dough- make it feel chastised- in order to make a good loaf. "Make the dough feel sorry for itself" he used to tell me these bakers taught him. Hair, sweat and all used to go into the french bread loaves he delivered every day.

 

So, the next iterations of doughballs, I slammed the rolling pin down on them, rolled them out with a fervor usually reserved for a pizza dough, handled it as "teaching it the business". The beautiful Mrs Rivet- doing her housecleaning and observing as she would walk by- asked me if I was making the dough feel sorry for itself~ She certainly has remembered those tales from my dad too!

 

"Of course", I replied..."this is gonna become a proper pita bread whether it wants to or not!"

 

"Should you take your shirt off and bounce the dough off your chest?",  she asked. Since I don't have enough chest hair for the full "Franco-American" effect, she volunteered to rub one of our cats across my chest to leave enough hairs on me to pass onto the dough!

 

I declined....

 

Worked like a charm, and and after that, they looked like a proper pita should!