Reader Herb wrote in to ask if pita dough can be left in the fridge longer than eight or ten hours. It certainly can. Once it’s chilled down, it’ll hold in the refrigerator for up to three days. You can “retard” most yeast doughs in this way, and yes, they will continue to develop flavor […]
READ ONThough sometimes it feels like it — especially when I read my email — I’m not the only one out there criticizing Michael Pollan. Here is a very interesting essay by farmer Blake Hurst in The American. Blogger Matt Yglesias at thinkprogress.org has this to say (scroll down to the Food Network Logo)…and this lively […]
READ ONI was fiddling with pita over the weekend and came up with this new formula. It’s much faster than the original version, assuming you have some refreshed and active starter hanging around. I put sourdough in quotations since a bread that’s not made with a starter that’s local to the San Francisco Bay area can’t […]
READ ONWhenever I do a flatbread recipe I always get one or two questions about dough “improvers” and/or dough “relaxers”. It seems they pop up in more than a few published recipes for pizza, pita, focaccia and they like. What are they and are they really necessary? The short answer is they’re extra things ingredient makers […]
READ ONMaybe the biggest thing that prevents home bakers from striking out and making their own pita bread is the fear that getting the “pocket” to form is somehow difficult. Actually, pita “pocket bread” is a great example of a fault being turned into a feature. If any of you remember my focaccia and ciabatta escapades, […]
READ ONIf Neolithic man could make flat bread, odds are just about all of us can too. If you’re convinced you’re one of those people who’s simply not capable of making palatable bread, your self-image is about to change. The formula is: 16 ounces unbleached all-purpose (AP) flour (substitute whole wheat four for up to half […]
READ ONHow is it that flat breads came before loaf breads? Simply because hot rocks came before ovens — and flat breads bake up beautifully on them. The first foods prepared on these sorts of proto-griddles were simple grain-and-water gruels, the predecessors of today’s pancakes. Leave a nice wet grain gruel sitting out a little too […]
READ ONPita bread is just about the easiest bread I know, so I’m all over this week’s request. The thing is, I spent most of my life thinking I hated pita bread. The reason, because I’d only ever eaten the dry, flavorless, almost brittle stuff that comes in plastic bags. It never occurred to me to […]
READ ONThought it might be fun to end my Week O’ Waffles with a demonstration of how waffles have been made since just about forever. As it happens, cooking irons of the kind that have been used since classical times are still being made. Check it out: Twenty bucks at any camping outfitter (if there’s a […]
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