Pita Bread

This is one of the easiest breads to make.  My cousin Annie sent me this wonderful cookbook called Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois.  It has so many great recipes in it.  For this one I highly recommend a baking stone and a pizza peel.  The dough is the same recipe as the Artisan bread and the pizza crust. You can look at my other posts for those two recipes, but this is a refresher on how to make the dough.

I have found it convenient to write the ingredients right on the container lid of where I store the dough.  A plastic shoe box container or a container similar in size is what you need to make this dough.  It can be stored in you refrigerator for weeks.  This makes it so quick and easy to make pizza or bread last minute.

What you need:

Take all of these ingredients and pour them into the container and mix them up.  You can put them in a standing mixer first to mix it if you don't want to do it by hand, but either works just fine.  The water should be room temperature.

Put the lid on the container and let rise until the dough touches the top of the lid.  At this point you can either put it in your refrigerator for future use, or use it!  When the dough is cold, it is easier to work with.  For this recipe I used 1/4 of the dough to make 4 pitas.  Break off 1/4 of the dough. The dough will be sticky so make sure you flour your hands good.   It should be about the size of a grapefruit.

Put your baking stone in the oven and turn your oven to 500 degrees.  Next, divide your dough into 4 equal pieces.

Having floured your hands and your work surface, roll the pieces out to 1/8" thickness.  Be careful to get the dough to a uniform thickness.

Place all the rounds on a floured pizza peel and slide them onto the hot stone in the oven.  If you do not have a peel, you are going to very carefully place the rounds on the hot baking stone.

Bake for 5-7 minutes, until golden brown.  When you take them out of the oven, wrap them in a clean dish towel.  After I took the picture I wrapped them up all the way in the cloth.  The pitas will deflate slightly as they cool.  The space between crusts will still be there, but may have to be nudged apart with a fork.

Enjoy for sandwiches or cut up and toasted for dips!