Pita Bread
Pita (also spelled pitta) breads are very easy to make, and once you've made your own you'll never want to buy the stale, hard, dry, tasteless shop bought version again. The recipe is a straightforward 60% dough, optionally enriched with a small amount of olive oil. You can use all white flour, wholemeal, or a mixture of the two, as below. I recommend using a proportion of plain/all purpose flour rather than all strong flour, for a softer result.
Ingredients
For about 15 pitas:
400g strong white bread flour
200g strong wholemeal bread flour
200g plain/all purpose flour
1½ tsp fast acting/easy blend yeast
16g/2 tsp salt
20g/1½ tbsp olive oil (optional)
480g water
Method
Mix all the ingredients and knead either by hand or in a stand mixer, for five minutes, or until you have a smooth dough that will stretch to form a translucent windowpane without tearing. Cover with a lightly oiled piece of cling film/plastic wrap and leave to rise either overnight in the fridge, or for at least two hours at a cool room temperature.
When you are ready to bake, put a baking stone or pizza stone into your oven and preheat to the highest setting - 250°C/480°F/gas mark 9 or as near to that as it will go. Tip the fermented dough onto a well floured worktop and knead again to get rid of all trapped gas bubbles - pita breads are treated very differently to many other breads which have to be handled carefully at this stage to keep all the bubbles inside. Divide the dough into about 15 equal pieces, each weighing 80-90g. Roll each piece into a ball and leave on a well floured worktop, covered with a cloth. Flour your worktop and rolling pin liberally and roll out one of the balls of dough into an oval shape until it is about 3mm thick - it should be thin, but not paper thin: we're not making filo pastry. Slap the dough from hand to hand a few times to get rid of excess flour, then put it on a piece of baking parchment paper. If your baking stone is rectangular, you should be able to fit three pitas side by side on one piece of parchment, a round stone might only fit two.
Pita breads rolled out and ready to bake
Slide the parchment onto the hot baking stone, close the door (no need to add steam) and bake for just four minutes. The pitas should puff up like balloons, and just about show signs of starting to brown.
Pita breads at the end of baking
If you bake them until they are brown you will have crunchy pitas, which is not the desired result. While the first batch is baking, you will have time to roll out the next two or three pitas. When you take one batch out of the oven, put them on a wire cooling tray and cover with a cloth to stop them drying out. They will deflate and flatten as they cool. Save the baking parchment each time, you can alternate between two pieces for the whole batch.
Completed batch of pita breads cooling on a rack
You can eat the pitas while still warm, or once they have cooled, you can make them puff up again for a middle eastern pocket-style sandwich by spraying very lightly with water on each side, and putting under a hot grill/broiler for a minute or two per side. You can also do this with pitas straight from the freezer, so they are very useful for making a quick lunch without having to defrost a whole loaf of bread.