Barley Baking

Although the banana cake I'm about to share with you is quite delicious, it worries me. Or rather, the amount of kitchen cabinet space that I have been dedicating to alternative flours is worrying me. At this point, what was once the appropriately-sized home of a tub of all-purpose flour and a sack of whole wheat has become the dangerously small hideaway for white whole wheat, whole wheat pastry, barley, cornmeal, vital wheat gluten, garbanzo...you get the idea.

Every time I open the cabinet, I invite the risk of being overwhelmed by an avalanche of tenuously-positioned flours. I don't even want to think about what the clean-up for that disaster would be like. Unfortunately, though, as long as I continue to find new and exciting ways to use them, the flours are here to stay. Maybe we'll have to figure out a better storage solution.

The flour du jour today is whole barley flour, which is slightly less caloric than whole wheat, contains a decent amount of soluble fiber, and has a slightly sweet, oatmeal-like flavor. It is similar to rye (ooh, another denizen of the flour cabinet!) in that it contains gluten, but not quite as much as wheat. This makes it an appropriate choice for quick breads and other baked goods with a crumbly or cake-like texture, but won't work so well for yeasted breads.


So back to that cake. I've made this quite a few times now, mostly because it is easy and tasty, but also because it provides the perfect opportunity to use up past-their-prime bananas. We had two such specimens on the counter this morning, and the rest is history.

This cake is inspired by a traditional coffee cake, and is made with an oat-y, chocolate-y, walnut-y streusel layer that lends a lovely texture and medley of flavors. Unlike most coffee cakes, though, the cake itself is very light, low in fat, and sweetened primarily by the bananas. That's why I call it a "snack" cake - not exactly a decadent dessert (although it does make a nice dessert), but perfect for breakfast, brunch, or general all-purpose snacking. I challenge you to bake it and make it last for more than a day.

I've made the cake with 100% barley flour, although I like the texture that a bit of wheat imparts. I suppose you could also make the cake with 100% wheat, but barley is so fun, and goes quite well with banana (and not just because of the alliteration). The streusel is also flexible; you can leave out the chocolate or walnuts if you are so inclined (note that I am in no way endorsing this inclination). So go crazy - buy some barley flour, let some bananas languish on your counter, and treat yourself to this tasty snack.

Banana Barley Snack Cake

For Cake:
1 c. barley flour
1/2 c. whole wheat pastry flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. ground ginger
1/4 tsp. cardamom
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 c. brown sugar
1 egg
1/2 c. buttermilk
2 mashed ripe bananas
1 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
2 tbs. melted butter

For Topping:
1/4 c. rolled oats
1/4 c. chopped walnuts
1-2 tbs. brown sugar
1 1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1 tbs. melted butter
handful chocolate chips

Directions:
Mix flours, sugar, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and spices in a medium bowl and whisk to combine. In a separate bowl, mash the bananas, and then add the melted butter, buttermilk, vanilla, and egg. Mix well. Pour wet ingredients into dry ingredients, and stir until combined. Batter will be thick. Prepare topping: melt butter, and then add remaining ingredients and stir to combine. Pour about 3/4 of the cake batter into a greased 8x8 square pan. Sprinkle topping evenly over the batter. Drop remaining batter by spoonfuls over the oat topping. Bake cake at 375 F for 20-25 minutes, until tester comes out fairly clean (a few bits of topping may stick).

Adding Some Yeast to the Morning Routine

I'm sure I've said it before, but I'll say it again: breakfast and brunch are my favorite meals, especially when it comes to entertaining. Dinner parties are fun, lunch is cute, but there is something so cozy and friendly about brunch, and I love waking up to bake muffins or whip up a batch of buttermilk pancakes.

This weekend we had some friends over for brunch, and kept it simple with scrambled eggs, toast, and the newest addition to our morning repertoire: fresh-from-the-griddle English muffins. The best thing about the muffins, though, is that they don't just have to be an entertaining-only affair. They are definitely impressive and delicious, and yes, they do require a yeasted batter, but I'd be so bold as to say that they are actually easier to make than a regular batch of pancakes.



I guess that's why I've made them three times in the past two weeks. The only "rise" they need is a quick 45-minute rest, which happens to be the perfect window for checking email (or if you're me, about 1000 food blogs), and whisking a few eggs or making some oatmeal. The best part about these muffins, though, is that they are cooked on a griddle instead of baked. Plus, the batter is wet and malleable enough that you don't need to roll them out - just drop a puff of dough on the griddle and you're good to go. Sure, they come out a little irregularly shaped, but that's never stopped anybody from eating them as far as I can tell.

These English muffins are worlds better than anything that you can buy in a store. Fresh off the griddle, they are warm and steamy, with a soft, chewy interior. Forget nooks and crannies - these muffins have supple peaks of yeasty dough tucked between lightly crisped edges, browned and golden from the heat of the griddle. They can, theoretically, be split and toasted or slathered with jam, but Jonathan insists on eating them plain. The flavor imparted by a generous amount of yeast, a touch of whole wheatiness, and a bit of sugar is surprisingly robust.

In the spirit of giving credit where credit is due, the recipe I use is adapted from a recipe I found on the excellent baking blog, Baking Bites. It is one of the only recipes I found that doesn't require several rises, the use of elusive English muffin rings, or other wildly inconvenient processes that would make these prohibitively involved for an everyday breakfast item. My only modification is to substitute a cup of whole wheat flour for one cup of regular white flour. I've made them both ways, but whole wheat flour lends a heartier taste, in addition to a few grams of my favorite nutrient: fiber.

The only mildly challenging part of this recipe is the cooking. If the heat under the griddle is too high, you'll end up with a burnt exterior and a slightly underdone interior. I use relatively low heat, allowing the griddle to heat up just until some water sprinkled on it sizzles and evaporates. Once you drop the dough on the griddle, don't move it for a few minutes, flipping it once the underside is golden brown and the sides of the muffin are starting to dry out. The muffin is done when both sides are golden brown and the sides are dry to the touch, about 5-8 minutes total.



I love this recipe for many reasons, but here are the ones that will convince you to try it: 1) it only has 5 ingredients that don't come from the faucet 2) it yields a yeasty, bready flavor with only a 45-minute rise 3) it is in no way similar to anything store-bought 4) the muffins are delicious and healthy without the use of any dubious "substitutions." Enjoy!

Shockingly Easy English Muffins (adapted from Baking Bites)

2 c. flour (white, half whole-wheat, or 100% whole wheat)
3/4 tsp. salt
2 1/4 tsp. instant yeast
1 tbs. sugar
1/3 c. water
1 c. skim milk
cooking spray

Directions:
Whisk together flour, yeast, salt, and sugar in a large bowl. Warm the water and milk together in the microwave until warm, about 45 seconds. Mix the liquids into the flour, stirring with a wooden spoon to combine thoroughly. Beat until well-mixed, about 30 seconds or so. Dough will be wet (much wetter than most bread doughs). Cover bowl with plastic wrap and a tea towel, and set aside to rest for about 45 minutes, until puffed and bubbly. To cook the muffins: heat a griddle or skillet over medium heat until water sprinkled on its surface sizzles and evaporates immediately. Lightly grease with cooking spray, and then drop big spoonfuls of the dough onto the griddle using either a greased spoon or a greased measuring cup (I use a 1/3 c. measure). Cook until golden brown, and then flip and cook until sides of muffin are dry. They are best eaten fresh, but keep very well in a zip-top plastic bag for a day or two.

Clean the Pantry Salad

First things first: I have a wee bit of virtual housekeeping to take care of. If you look to the right of this post, you'll see a whole bunch of fun stuff, some of which could use a little explaining. As you might notice, Red Ramekin is now a featured publisher on Foodbuzz. Honestly, I have no idea a) how we became a "featured publisher," or b) what a "featured publisher" actually is. But it seems cool, and Foodbuzz itself is a pretty cool website. Think Facebook, but yummier. The site connects a whole bunch of foodies from around the world, and bloggers can submit recipes, photos, restaurant reviews, and blog posts to the site. You can "vote" for your favorite items to give them more "buzz" ... or something like that. If you want to "vote" for me, click the button!

Next, of course, is the Daring Bakers stuff, which I've already explained. If you want to see other Daring Bakers, though, click on the Daring Bakers Blogroll. Then comes the newest addition to the extraneous stuff: Food Blog Search. Food Blog Search is actually a really great search engine that runs through Google. You can search over 2000 blogs (Red Ramekin is one of them!) for recipes, ideas, or whatever. And to think...you thought Epicurious was nifty! So last year.

Way down below is the Foodie Blogroll, which is being continually updated with new food blogs. Tasty!

Ok, so now that the virtual housekeeping is out of the way, how about some real housekeeping? And by housekeeping, I of course mean pantry cleaning. Jonathan and I are moving in a few weeks, which has inspired me to go on a pantry-emptying rampage. I don't mean tossing things in the trash, either. We're talking about ways to make dinner out of that handful of lentils in the back of the cabinet, or how to bake a cake using a half-cup of blue cornmeal, a forgotten bag of dried apricots, and a baggie-full of anise seeds (all things that happen to be in the cabinet at this very moment).


I hate throwing away food, but I'm not psyched about transporting all of those dried grains and other foodstuffs to the new apartment, even if it is only a few miles away from 20 Ellery. As a result, we have officially entered the pantry cleaning days, during which I plan to use up as much stuff and purchase as little stuff as is humanly possible. This may be as close as I get to Top Chef, so I plan to enjoy the challenge.

In fact, I enjoyed the challenge very much the other night, when I came up with a surprisingly tasty kamut salad. Before I go into the joys of pronouncing the word "kamut," I will say that the nature of this challenge is such that it becomes harder with time. This salad benefited from a rather healthy variety of pantry-stuffs, including a jar of artichoke hearts, some rogue pine nuts, a chunk of feta, and a gaggle of capers. I'm not sure I want to think about what my options will be come May 20, but for now they aren't so bad.


But back to the kamut - pronounced kuh-MOOT. Kamut is an heirloom variety of wheat, characterized by having significantly larger grains (berries) and being higher in protein than traditional hard or soft wheat. We can discuss my bulk bin addiction at some other time, but for now suffice it say that we have lots of baggies with lots of nearly indistinguishable whole grains to keep us occupied for a while. One of these was full of whole kamut grains, so I decided to give them a soak and make something with them.

I'm pretty proud of myself for having used up so many ingredients, and for making something that was so tasty, to boot. The pine nuts in this salad were an unenthusiastic add-in, but were actually the perfect savory touch to this slightly acid-heavy salad. The roasted tomatoes and artichoke hearts added some great color, texture, and vegetable-ness to the mix, and the feta tied it all together. To top it all off, there was a suspicious-looking half onion hanging out in the fridge, so I diced that up, roasted it with the tomatoes, and tossed it in for some flavor. And what else? The capers were...capers. No complaints on that front. A little vinegar, olive oil, and seasoning, and this clean-the-pantry salad was born.


I'll include a (loose) recipe for the salad here, but the spirit of the dish is really using things that are taking up space in the cupboard. To follow this recipe, then, you may actually have to not follow it all....it's pretty meta.

A note about kamut, and other non-polished whole grains: these are not the things of 30-minute meals. They require a leisurely soak (I soaked the kamut for about 24 hours), and then a leisurely simmer (1 1/2 - 2 hours). I cooked the kamut in an excess of liquid so that I could let it simmer all afternoon without my having to worry about my liquid evaporating. Even after all of that cooking though, the grains still had a nice bite to them. I'm pretty sure you could cook them forever and they'd still be "al dente." But just think of all of the fiber you'll be eating! So here's my loose recipe. Use it for ideas or inspiration, or, if you aren't planning a move in the next month, use it to make this tasty salad.

Clean the Pantry Kamut Salad

1 c. kamut grains, soaked for a day
about 1 pint cherry tomatoes, halved
half a medium onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, smashed with the back of a knife
handful of capers
1 small jar of artichoke hearts (drained and rinsed if they are "marinated")
large handful of toasted pine nuts
small chunk of feta cheese, crumbled
about 2 tbs. olive oil
splash of balsamic vinegar
generous salt, pepper, and seasonings
additional olive oil, salt, and pepper for roasting onion and tomatoes

Directions:
Soak kamut for a long, long time. Once soaked, cook kamut for a long, long time, in about 6 c. of salted water or broth. After about 1 1/2 - 2 hours, kamut should be toothsome, but not hard. Drain kamut and remove to a large bowl. Meanwhile, roast the tomatoes, onion, and garlic. Drizzle with olive oil, salt, and pepper, and roast or broil until tomatoes and garlic are just starting to blister, about 10 minutes under the broiler. Add vegetables to the kamut, and then add the artichokes, capers, pine nuts, and feta. Stir to combine, and then season with oil, vinegar, salt, pepper, and spices to taste.

Daring Slackers!

Oh yay! That time of month again - the Daring Bakers strike again, and the culinary blogosphere is dotted with all manner of adorable frozen cheesecake pops. The pops were this month's challenge, hosted by Deborah, of Taste and Tell, and Elle, of Feeding My Enthusiasms.

I was delighted as I did my usual food-blogs-of-the-world tour yesterday evening, as I had the chance to see some lovely photos and some insanely detailed cheesecake-pop decorations. Alas, this month's challenge wasn't meant to be over here at Red Ramekin, and I didn't get around to participating.

It's not that I didn't want to try the pops, but honestly, all of that chilling, freezing, tempering, beating, dunking and drying - not to mention the FIVE, yes FIVE (5), packages of cream cheese required for the recipe - made me into a Daring Slacker this month. Besides, cheesecake just doesn't really do it for me. I have a sweet tooth to write home about, but I'd rather sink it into something like cookies, brownies, cake, or ice cream than cheesecake. Next month I promise to make something spectacular, though.

In the meantime, I encourage you to check out some of the creations of my fellow Daring Bakers: Jen, as always, serves up the most impressively-photographed pops, with some biting wit on the side. Peabody's pops are so ridiculously cute they should be illegal. And then there's Tartelette, who takes decorating to a whole new level. It's probably better that I sat this one out; there is no way I was taking the time to put rainbow-colored sprinkles and cautious little drizzles on things I wasn't even excited about eating.

That's not to say that I haven't been concocting sweet treats of my own design lately. Jonathan and I made frozen yogurt in the ice cream maker (astonishingly, our first batch of fro yo!) not once, but twice. The first time I used mostly full-fat Fage Greek yogurt, which, in taste and in nutritional profile is shockingly similar to sour cream. Hmmm....all I can say is that those probiotic cultures better be pretty damn healthy...

The second time around, I used non-fat Fage. Still yummy, but not quite as, um, creamy as the first time around. Definitely delicious enough to make again, though, and maybe next time it'll stick around long enough for a photo!

The more interesting dish, though, was my submission to this month's Royal Foodie Joust, another blog event hosted by my totally blog-eriffic e-friend, Jenn (aka the Leftover Queen). The premise of the Foodie Joust is this: each month, last month's winner chooses three ingredients, which have to be used in a creative recipe. Bloggers vote for the most creative/delicious entry. I've been wanting to participate in this event for a while, because I love creating a good recipe now and then, and this month I finally got around to it. The ingredients this month were mango, cardamom, and brown sugar. Um, delicious? Obvio.


I decided on a mango-sticky rice variant, and created a bruleed, cardamom-scented brown sticky rice with fresh mango slices. I wanted to keep the mango fresh, because we've been lucky enough to find some unbelievably delicious Mexican mangoes at Whole Foods recently. I've also been itching to try sweet brown sticky rice, which seems to be nutritionally indistinguishable from regular old brown rice, but is much more delicate and ever-so-slightly sweet.

Some friends came over on Thursday night, and mercifully helped us to devour the yogurt and the mango-rice number. Some nuked and juicy frozen blueberries were the perfect complement both to the yogurt and the mango sticky rice.


A real recipe isn't necessary for the mango sticky rice, but here is a brief description of how to recreate it: Prepare sweet brown sticky rice in a rice cooker, using a 2:1 water:rice ratio. Add about 6 green cardamom pods to the rice and water before cooking. Once cooked, allow to cool. Place about 1/4 c. cooked rice in each well of a muffin tin, and sprinkle tops generously with brown sugar. Place under the broiler until caramelized and bubbly (this happens quickly!). Allow to cool, then remove each rice patty to a plate. Top with freshly sliced mango and your choice of other toppings: whipped cream, yogurt, ice cream, thawed frozen blueberries, etc.


I loved the combination of the spiced rice and juicy mango, and have since realized that this "dessert" is actually much healthier than the typical American breakfast. The only added sugar is the sprinkling of brown sugar on the rice, and it includes both whole grains and fresh fruit. Get where I'm going with this one? Serve it for dessert, or brunch, or breakfast...in any case, it is definitely worth a try. The cooked rice also keeps pretty well, so make some the day before you plan to serve the dessert to save yourself some prep time. Hey, I may be a Daring Slacker, but nobody who ate this was complaining.

Hot Chick Pizza

I know, I know...it's been a slow blog month for me. Just when i thought I'd have all the free time in the world, little things started popping up - apartment searching, catch-up schoolwork, weekend trips - that have been keeping my posting at bay.

Luckily I've still had ample time to cook, and in addition to some new sweet baking experiments (recipes coming soon, I hope!), I've been playing around with bread doughs, too. And I'm not just talking about whole wheat pitas, either. I do love my whole wheat pitas, and I especially love the versatility of the dough, but my last creation took flatbread to a new level.

For one, I used a special secret ingredient in the dough. More importantly, though, I created my first original yeasted dough recipe. Most of the chemically-leavened recipes on this site are my original recipes, and I've gotten pretty comfortable baking on the fly, without a recipe, recording measurements as I go. Yeast, though, has always been a tricky thing, and I've mostly stuck with other people's guidelines when it comes to making pizza, pita, or bread.

Ever since the last pita episode, though, I've been looking for a good day to make more flatbread. The idea of a Mediterranean pizza seemed to be stuck in my head, and I wondered if I could incorporate some of that inspiration into the dough itself, and not just the toppings on the bread. Thus my garbanzo dough was created. I was hoping to get a real chick pea flavor in my dough with the addition of garbanzo flour.

Honestly, I can't say that I'd be able to pinpoint garbanzo as the distinctive flavor of this dough, but it really was much more flavorful than ordinary dough. It turned out to be the perfect backdrop for a host of different toppings, including spinach, red onion, roasted peppers, herbs, and feta.

I made the dough with a sponge in the hopes of it imparting a certain richness in flavor that straight doughs often lack. Although it sounds complicated, a sponge is like a pre-dough made with all of the liquid, part of the flour, and the yeast of the recipe, which allows the yeast to develop a bit before the addition of more flour and other flavoring agents (salt, oil, etc.). The sponge entails an extra rising period, but this recipe is pretty flexible - I made it on a day when I was in and out of the kitchen, and all of the rising times are approximate. I've said it before and I'll say it again: it's pretty hard to mess up a flatbread dough.


The dough mixed and rose beautifully, and was particularly easy to roll out for thin, almost cracker-like pizza crusts. A combination of garbanzo, white whole wheat, and whole wheat flours resulted in a lower gluten content and thus a slightly less elastic dough than a traditional wheat dough. After a few minutes on the pizza stone, the crusts were golden, crunchy, and slightly bubbly around the edges, but the interior was thin and a bit chewy.

Given that legumes in general are about the healthiest thing one can consume, and that they lend a distinctly savory and pleasant flavor to this dough, its appeal is two-fold. I made a bunch of dough, used half for dinner on Friday, and then saved the rest in the refrigerator for lunch on Sunday. Yes, the secret is out, I'm so not doing the whole matzah thing. The name "hot chick pizza," though, was created during the car ride back from a Passover seder...

We took the dough in a whole bunch of directions, so it wasn't just plain old pizza, either. We made several smallish thin-crust breads, some with spinach and ricotta, and some with peppers, onions, and pine nuts. We also did a "deep-dish" risen-crust pie with sausage and mozzarella (guess who ate that one?). We tried out a wee calzone with ricotta, tomatoes, and spinach, and even made a little garbanzo griddle cake that Jonathan ate with scrambled eggs for breakfast.

Next time, I think I'll make a huge batch of this dough, and stash some in the freezer so that when I'm struck by a garbanzo griddle cake craving (they happen to the best of us), I'll be totally prepared. Seriously, though, this dough is awesome. Try it!

Whole Wheat Garbanzo Dough (for Chick Pizza)

Sponge:
1 c. garbanzo flour
1 c. white whole wheat flour
1 tbs. instant yeast
1 tsp. sugar
1 3/4 c. warm water

Dough:
All of sponge
2 1/2 - 3 1/2 c. whole wheat bread flour
2 tsp. salt
2 tbs. olive oil

Directions:
Prepare sponge: mix dry ingredients in a large bowl, and add warm water. Stir for a few minutes, until thoroughly combined. Sponge with be very wet. Let sponge sit, covered, for about 45 minutes, until bubbly. Add salt and oil, and then start adding additional flour. Stir in about 2 c. of flour, adding more until dough is too stiff to stir with a wooden spoon. Turn out the dough and begin kneading, continuing to add flour until it is just tacky and smooth. Return dough to bowl and cover with oiled plastic wrap and a dish towel. Let rise until about doubled in bulk, 1 1/2-2 hours. Punch down dough and either roll out for pizzas or place in a sealed plastic bag and store in the refrigerator until ready to use. Makes enough dough for about 6 smallish, thin-crusted pizzas.

Farro Soup (Book Review)

A while ago, Mia picked up a copy of Deborah Madison's "Vegetable Soups." It's a beautiful book, with lots of vibrant, colorful pictures, and lots of recipes for vegetable soups. I like soup a lot, and I especially like making vegetable soups, because they're easy, they look good, and they're delicious. They require no particular skills, and they're basically impossible to mess up. Plus, I like chopping vegetables, which is usually required in large quantity.

The first soup that we chose to make from the book (and which we have re-made several times) is the summer version of the farro soup. We had just bought some farro in California for half the price that Whole Foods in Cambridge charges, so we were eager to make something with farro. In addition, the winter version of farro soup in the book is basically the same as the summer version sans tomatoes - why leave out the tomatoes when you can add them?

As in all of the vegetable soups I have made, you begin this one by chopping up an onion, carrots, and celery and sauteing them in olive oil. Then you add tomato paste and fry it for a little while. Next comes tomatoes, then water and pre-soaked farro. At the very end, you add a can of chickpeas. Deborah insists that, unless the chickpeas are organic, you should dispose of the liquid, but I consider that to be, if not pretentiously green, at least overly cautious. Then again, I don't wash my produce carefully, and I strongly prefer charcoal grills, so maybe I'm just asking for trouble.

As usual with soup, the most important thing is to make sure there is enough salt in it. Luckily, if there isn't enough salt, the solution is quick and easy - add more. The same is true with other seasonings. Mark Bittman had a recent post that suggests that the timing of salt addition is not nearly as important as people think, and I trust Mark Bittman, so I don't worry too much about under-salting the soup at first.

As you can see from the pictures, the tomatoes give the broth a nice red color, and the various vegetables give lots of pleasing contrast. The soup is best served warm, of course, but when we make a gallon of it, Mia and I usually can't resist taking it out of the fridge and gorging on it cold right out of the used yogurt containers that serve as our Tupperware. It never lasts very long.

Would Not a Pita by Any Other Name...

Taste so damn good? I think you can guess the answer to that question. We've made homemade pita a few times now, but I've finally been inspired to blog about it because of the various pita incarnations that came out of our most recent batch.

On Friday night we had the pleasure of entertaining two friends who, luckily, don't mind showing up to dinner at the scheduled time to find their hostess covered in flour and furiously rolling out the dough for fresh pitas (pita is something you want to eat straight from the oven, anyway - trust me). We made one of my favorite meals: chicken and lamb marinated in lemon and mint, roasted zucchini and eggplant, a kalamata-studded Greek salad, and of course, fresh whole-wheat pita. To top it all off, Jonathan made a lemony hummus, and I mixed up a bowlful of tahini-yogurt-cucumber dip. Seriously, this is one of the best-tasting meals in the world, and it is perfect for entertaining. Serve everything family style, and dig in.

But back to the pita. There isn't a whole lot of room for experimentation with the dough itself; I picked a recipe from the amazingly entertaining and informative blog Arabic Bites, and did my usual 100% whole wheat thing (I used whole wheat bread flour, to be exact). I mixed and kneaded by hand, then let it rise for about 2 hours, allowing for a long rest because I was using whole wheat flour. Although I did a fair bit of kneading, I am a firm believer in the idea that you can't really mess up a flatbread. Since you end up rolling it out before baking, it doesn't fall prey to the usual problems that come with yeasted breads (and believe me, I've seen them all).

To go with the meat, veggies, and hummus, I made a whole bunch of regular pitas, making sure to roll them out very thinly in order to achieve that magical balloon effect that leaves the bread with the oh-so-convenient pocket. I won't pretend to know why rolling the dough very thinly has this effect on the baked breads, but it does. See?



After some experimentation, I've decided that soft pitas are best for dipping and stuffing, so I take them out of the oven very soon after they've puffed. As they cool, they deflate and develop a light and chewy crumb. They stay soft like this for at least a few hours...maybe more, although they've never stuck around our kitchen long enough for me to know.

But while plain pita is great and all, I used this batch to test out a few other ideas. The first was a Mediterranean-ish flatbread, which turned out to be great pre-dinner snacking food that we consumed while I finished rolling/baking the remaining pitas on Friday evening. I simply rolled out a hunk of dough, brushed it generously with olive oil, and then topped to my heart's content. I made a couple versions, both of which started with a hefty sprinkling of spices. My sister introduced me to authentic za'atar after her recent trip to Israel, so in an attempt to mimic that flavor combination, I dusted the glistening dough rounds with plenty of thyme, sesame seeds, cumin seeds, salt, and pepper. The first flatbread also had olives, feta, and red onion, and on the second bread I substituted the feta for some pine nuts.


Both were quite tasty, especially dunked in hummus and yogurt. Next time I think I'll use more toppings, although I've baked enough heavy-handedly topped pizzas to know that this can cause its own problems...that pizza peel to pizza stone transition can get ugly.


A bit of leftover dough languished in the refrigerator all day on Saturday, which gave it a little extra yeasty tang on Sunday, when we had the opportunity to bake it. My daily food blog perusal turned up the spectacular idea of a breakfast pizza, which I was itching to create myself. This was indeed utterly delicious - perhaps my favorite incarnation of this round of pita. I topped the pizza with spinach, mozzarella, and one egg, which rolled around threateningly as I attempted to move the pizza into the oven. There were no disasters, though, even if the yolk cooked a bit more quickly than I would have liked in the hot oven. The egg white was perfectly soft, though, and melded with the melted mozzarella to form a lovely blanket over the wilted spinach.

Before:
After:
In the future this pizza won't be relegated to breakfast - I can easily see an egg atop all sorts of tasty pizza ingredients, and a little runny yolk always makes everything taste better, right? As always, I used my pizza stone (both for the pitas and the flatbreads), and the crust on this pizza was slightly crisp on the outside, but chewy and bubbly on top. Definitely the best brunch food I've made in a while, or at the very least, since the last time I made brunch.

So, while I continue to dream up new ideas for my next batch of pita dough, I'll also encourage you to experiment with some pita of your own. Most recipes I've found are pretty much the same: flour, water, yeast, sugar, oil, and salt. Choose one, heat up your oven as high as it will go, and get rollin'. It is definitely worth the effort.