Syrian Pita

Today I dumped everything into the bread machine to make my new favourite Multigrain bread (listed in a previous post) and left for a nice, long motorcycle ride. Came home and had some wonderful, fresh bread waiting for us.

After another ride in the late afternoon, I remembered I had to make pita for the the BBQ later. So I rushed home, threw the ingredients into the bread machine and put my feet up while it did all the mixing and kneading for me.


Ingredients

1 1/8 cups water
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1/2 teaspoon white sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons active dry yeast

Add to bread machine in your manufacturer's recommended order. Select Dough cycle, press Start.


After it finished rising, I cut the wonderfully tender dough ball into 9 equal pieces.

While the sausages were cooking on the BBQ, I warmed up a skillet and started rolling out the balls. I like to keep the balls covered with plastic wrap to prevent them from drying out while I fry each pita.


I roll out the first one as thin as I can, throw it into the skillet and by the time I finish rolling out the next pita, the one in the skillet is done.

 I don't use flour on the counter when rolling. All that does is make your pita slip around with the end result being you'll have a very difficult time getting it as thin as needed.


I'm not that great at making it perfectly round, but it's close enough.

In the skillet, I start off with just a little olive oil to season the pan, then after that I add nothing. Just the teflon pan is good enough.



Here, on the right, you see it starting to bubble up. I love it when it does that.

I've heard that the thinner you roll it, the better your chances are of that happening!

Here it's been flipped and I'm cooking the other side. It really only takes 2-3 minutes on each side.

A little bit of blackness adds to its character.

The batch is nicely cooling on a cooling rack.



And there's a nice BBQ'ed sausage in a pita fresh off the skillet!

Multigrain Bread

Just tried this new recipe I found at the Robin Hood site and it worked out great! Very tasty, the crumb is perfect. Love it.

For this one, I used my Zojirushi bread maker for the whole thing.

I like to have some good fall-back recipes I can rely on to make a nice loaf when I'm not going to be around to work the dough into whatever shape I want and put it in the oven.

My fall-back recipes are easy to toss into the machine, walk away, and return later to a perfect, delicious loaf of bread.

This recipe originally called for raisins and cinnamon, however, I opted out on them and the loaf still turned out great. No other adjustments to it were necessary.

Below is the recipe as found at Robin Hood:


MULTIGRAIN BREAD (optionally can be made as Raisin Bread)
Ingredients:
LARGE LOAF (1 1/2 lb/3 cup or 2 lb/4 cup machine)
1 1/4 cups (300 mL) water
2 tbsp (30 mL) butter or margarine
3 tbsp (45 mL) honey
1 1/2 cups (375 mL) ROBIN HOOD Best For Bread Homestyle White Flour
1 1/3 cups (325 mL) ROBIN HOOD Best For Bread Multigrain Blend
1 1/2 tsp (7 mL) salt
1 tsp (5 mL) cinnamon (OPTIONAL)
1 tsp (5 mL) bread machine yeast
1 cup (175 mL) raisins (OPTIONAL, can make it 1 1/4 cup)

Directions:

1. SELECT loaf size.
2. ADD ingredients to machine according to manufacturer’s directions.
3. SELECT White or Whole Wheat Cycle. 

1/2" of foaminess

I will leave this out for the night and feed again in the morning.

One hour after feeding

It is looking pretty active. It's foaming up and making lots of tiny bubbles.  Let's see what it is doing in an hour.

Resurrecting the sourdough starter

I had 8 cups of starter,  dumped 5 cups,  bringing it down to 3 cups.  Then I added 1 1/2 ups of flour and 1 1/2 cups of water which has brought it up to almost 6 cups,  almost doubling it.  Let's see if this works.  Here it is after having just fed it.

Problems with my starter

For some reason, my sourdough breads are not rising as they used to.  I'm going to take a break from sourdough bread making and send my starter off to "boot camp"!

In this pic you can see there is a little action, small bubbles on top. I have put it in a wider mouthed vessel for now while I clean its regular jar and doctor the beast itself. The wide mouth container will also allow more surface area for capturing whatever natural wild yeast float into my kitchen.

I have poured out 1 cup of starter and will feed it soon. First I want to see how much action I have in it before feeding it.

Unfortunately, I had to abandon my wild yeast project. I tried to make bread with it, but it tasted like bread made from home-made playdoh. Not good!

I'll attempt it again some other time.