My guess is you could simplify the recipe, maybe make a simple flying sponge with 50 grams of flour, 50 grams of water and 5 grams of yeast and let it sit for an hour or two. I like the idea of having both white flour and whole wheat flour, I think whole wheat would add good texture and flavor to pita.
Peter Reinhart has a recipe in American Pie for carta di musica pizza crust that behaves like a pita, you bake the dough on a stone long enough for it to puff up like a pita then take it out before it starts to get brown or crisp, let it cool (it will deflate), separate it along the outside edges into two pieces, and use it as the crust for two pizzas. If one part comes out a bit too thin, he suggests baking it further and using it as crackers. I haven't tried this yet, though.
This is a simple pizza sauce recipe that I've been using for my sheet pan pizzas. This makes enough sauce for 3 15x21 sheet pan pizzas, about 7 ounces per pizza. It freezes well.
1 15 ounce can tomato sauce
1 4 ounce can tomato paste
To this I add the liquid from a 15 ounce can of diced tomatoes, which is about two tablespoons. If I don't have that, I add 2 tablespoons of water. (The diced tomatoes will go on the pizza later on.)
1 tablespoon dried oregano
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1 teaspoon dried basil
1/2 teaspoon powdered marjoram
Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and cook for 10 minutes.
When making the pizza, I spoon the sauce onto the pizza in several places, then use a small pastry brush to spread the sauce around the dough.
To turn this into a marinara sauce for spaghetti I use:
1 15 ounce can tomato sauce
1 4 ounce can tomato paste
1 15 ounce can diced tomatoes (juice included)
2 4 ounce cans mushroom stems and pieces (juice included)
1 pound of ground beef, browned and drained
1 tablespoon dried oregano
1 teaspoon dried basil
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1/2 teaspoon powdered marjoram
Cook as above. Serves 4-6.
The sourdough pita is probably more work than I want to do, but those look excellent.
The recipe CWCdesign posted would be one that I might try.
Also, thanks to S. Wirth for posting the link to the pita article and recipe. I might try that one also. I note that in the picture the top and bottom are even thickness.
I am wondering if the amount of heat on the stone (or steel) affects the bottom and top thicknesses.
I made another sheet pan pizza. We had a friend over to help us eat it, then I baked off 3 of the fan tan cinnamon/maple rolls for dessert.
I was going to post a photo of the pizza before it went into the oven (I've posted several after baking shots), but my phone and gmail aren't talking to each other tonight.
Friday morning, I baked “Toffee-Pumpkin Snack Cake, my adaptation of a recipe from a seasonal magazine, Better Homes & Gardens Fall Baking (p. 28). I bake a half recipe for the two of us, and I reduce the oil in it from ½ to 1/3 cup and use homemade pumpkin puree, which I had frozen. I replace the pumpkin pie spice with my own blend and reduce the toffee pieces (used milk chocolate ones) from ½ cup to ¼ cup, which is mixed into the batter. I add 2 Tbs. milk powder. This time I reduced the sugar from ¾ to 2/3 cups. I strewed the top with pastel sprinkles, in a nod to spring. I omit the cream cheese frosting.
This link to a BBGA member's posts to Fresh Loaf on pita (among others) may be interesting.
Pita Recipe
I've got 3 peels (the 3rd came with something else and is still wrapped, I may gift it at some point) and I haven't decided if I prefer a wood one to a metal one; but the thin crust pizza I've been making for the past several months is rectangular and is being made on the bottom of a 16x22 pan, so it wouldn't fit on any peel I've ever seen.
I have a pizza stone, a wood peel and a steel peel. When I got the steel peel I stopped using the wood one. I build my pizza on a sheet of parchment and slide it onto the preheated stone using the steel peel. After 2 1/2 to 3 minutes I gently slide the peel under the pizza, just a little, and use my other hand (gloved) to pull out the parchment. The pizza finishes directly on the stone. It works very well.
This is the recipe I've used.
1/2 tsp instant yeast
3/4 cup white wheat flour (4 oz)
3/4 cup unbleached flour (4 oz)
3/4 tsp salt
1/2 tbsp olive oil
5 oz water
Put all in bread machine and do 1 knead cycle. Let rise for 2-3 hrs (or overnight) until a little more than double in bulk. Heat stone at 450 degrees for 1/2 hour or use parchment lined pan. Cut dough into 6 pieces and roll into balls. Put flour on counter and flatten a little into a circle by hand and flour both sides. Let rest 10 minutes and then roll into a 6 or 7 inch round that's 1/8 inch thick. Place on stone and bake for 4-5 minutes. Stack them on a towel and cover. When cool store in a ziploc bag.
I think there are one or two other pita recipes here, but neither are MrsM's. There's a MrsM on Pinterest, but I'm not sure if it is the same person and the pita recipe appears to be a link to someone else's recipe.
The KAF whole grains book has a recipe where you use 55% whole wheat flour, Beard on Bread recommends using 'hard wheat' flour, so he'd probably prefer bread flour over AP. This may be one of those cases where the oil you use (usually olive oil) makes a big difference in the taste.
I don't honestly remember what recipe we used the last time we made pita, it was at least 12 years ago.
The Persian restaurant that we like buys their pita from Omaha. A couple of years ago they couldn't get the pita they preferred one week, they were apologizing for its poor quality, though I thought it was still pretty good.
When we were in Germany in 2006, our son introduced us to doner kebab, which are served wrapped in a large flatbread that is like a pita but not split.
I got most of the water out last night, I'm not sure if I can get the rest out without having the plants fall over or out.
My pH meter says the water we use for the plants (we let it sit for a couple of days before using it on plants so the chlorine dissipates) is between 7.2 and 7.3, so slightly alkaline.
I remember from our hot water heater/dishwasher problems several years back that our city water changed its standard pH a few years back, which changed the type of anodes that were needed in water heaters to avoid having the water develop a sludge (which was clogging up the water valve in our basement dishwasher, causing it to fail.)
Today I made Olive-Gruyere Rolls. I rolled the dough out into a rectangle, spread it with grated Trader Joe's cheddar-gruyere and chopped green olives, then rolled it up (like cinnamon buns). I sliced it into 24 pieces which I put into oil-sprayed muffin tins. These are great with soup or salads.
One of the reasons I like the older editions of the Joy of Cooking is that they don't get carried away as much as some of the more recent editions do. (If I want to get carried away with a recipe, I'll pick up Mastering the Art of French Cooking or nearly any James Beard book.)
There are some pioneer recipes in the Nebraska Centennial Cookbook (my wife's mother was the editor who assembled all the recipes, testing nearly all of them), but I think my favorite old recipe was a bread recipe in a book my wife found in the UNL library.
The instructions were something like this: Grind up a peck of wheat and add enough water to make a good dough. (I think it also called for salt and 'old dough' for leavening.) Bake in a hot oven.
Nothing about how long to knead, how long to bulk rise, how big to make the loaves, how long to let them rise or bake. A sure-fire recipe, right? And yet, I'll bet my great-grandmother could have followed that recipe and made a table full of bread from it.
I ran across an article citing some recipes from ancient Rome, the writer of the article actually got several of them to work, though figuring out what the ingredients actually were was challenging.
I've only made a few recipes out of the KAF Cookie Companion, but when you already have the world's best chocolate chip oatmeal cookie recipe (IMHO, at least), who needs a large repertoire of cookies?
The plants are in a tray of 35 fiber pellet pots (that expanded when they got wet), with the pots sitting on a sponge that has its ends in a tub of water (the brand is Planter's Pride), so the pots are supposed to be damp on the bottom, because the pellet pot is sitting on a damp sponge, but I'm going to hold off on watering it for a while.
The folks at Earl May thought this was a good system for tomatoes, and they sprouted nicely.
Over-fertilization is possible, I suppose, I did put liquid plant food in twice.
I'm curious to know how hydroponics keeps the roots from getting too damp. I may have to read up on how hydroponics really works.
