Perfect Pita Bread

This recipe is from the cookbook Whole Grain Vegan Baking by Celine Steen and Tamasin Noyes.

 

Recipe: see page 78 of Whole Grain Vegan Baking.

This pita bread recipe was awesome. It is a huge difference eating homemade pita bread, rather than that stuff from the store, which I never like because it falls apart as soon as you start loading in the sandwich filling. When the pitas are fresh they are stretchier, they smell nicer, and they just taste better.

This recipe has the same ingredients as the Whole Grain Burger Buns on page 92, but with the addition of a little bit of vital wheat gluten, which is what gives this bread its stretchiness. So, if you are going to make one of these recipes, you might as well try the other.

The other reason I really liked this recipe is that it has a shorter prep time than regular loaf-type breads. It was only a few minutes of kneading, waiting for the rise (okay, that took awhile), and the baking time was less than 5 minutes. Watching the pitas bake was interesting. The oven is very hot and these look like tortillas when they go inside, but at around the 2-minute mark they start to puff up like balloons.

Ingredients: whole spelt flour, whole wheat flour, vital wheat gluten, molasses, water, active dry yeast, salt, oil.