Here’s a quick and easy pitta bread recipe as requested by my kind and talented Twitter friends @evilgordon & @karlasparlour.
I served it with a tasty lamb tangia slow cooked for 7 hours and which had some of the Smen I blogged about earlier.
The method is one I’ve borrowed from Dan Lepard, it saves a whole lot of faffing with the old ‘knead for 10 minutes’. It’s not necessary.
Ingredients
450g strong white flour
300g wholemeal spelt flour
50g rye flakes
5g cumin seeds
12g fast action yeast
12g caster sugar
12g fine sea salt
45g olive oil
500g warm water
Method
Put all the dry ingredients in a bowl and mix well.
Add the olive oil and rub in to the dry ingredients.
Add the water and mix well. You want to make sure all the dry ingredients are wet and the dough is mixed, that’s all.
Cover with plastic or a tea towel and leave in a warm place for 10 minutes. Do what I call a quick ‘Compass Knead’. Imagine the dough is a compass, pull in to the centre of the dough from N, E , S, W and repeat.
Cover again, leave in a warm place and repeat the Compass Knead twice more at 10 minute intervals.
Cover the dough and leave for 30 minutes in a warm place.
Take out the dough and scale it into approximately 110g pieces, you should get 12 pieces.
Leave the 12 pieces on a floured board to rest for 15 minutes.
Roll out the pieces of dough so that they are about 5mm thick and 15cm in diameter.
I cooked mine on a hot cast iron tava taking about 2 minutes for each side. They could be cooked on a tray or baking stone in a very hot oven for about 3-5 minutes. Put the cooked pitta in a clean tea towel to stay warm and moist.
Tuck in and enjoy!