How to Make Pita Bread | Bake It Up a Notch Bite Size

buckle up [Music] hi i'm erin jean mcdowell and welcome to this episode of bake it up a notch bite size i am so excited today because we are going to be sharing one of the first recipes from my new cookbook savory baking today we're making pitas let's get baking [Music] one of my very first jobs in a professional kitchen was as a bread baker and i just love the process of baking bread but specifically different flatbreads are really easy to kind of work into your day-to-day life your regular weekly meals it's a lot of fun and they are really flexible and pita is a really really fun one to make and the difference in eating a fresh beautiful warm pita versus one that you get at a store even at a favorite restaurant is just completely different so let's get going the coolest part for me about bread is that the mixing method is not always super complicated it's pretty much let's put this all in a bowl and mix it to combine so our ingredients here we've got some all-purpose flour as always the recipe is linked in the video description below so you can head there for all the amounts and the detailed method breakdown i'm also going to add some whole wheat flour and this isn't very much as you can see but it gives it a little bit of extra texture a little bit of nuttiness it's delicious we've also got a good amount of salt we gotta make sure our bread has got flavor and we have some yeast and some olive oil and finally some warm water we're gonna mix this on low speed for about three minutes until the dough starts to come together then we'll knock that speed up to about medium speed and we'll mix it for two minutes more if you want to you can also mix this dough by hand and it'll take you about five to seven minutes of kneading all right so i've finished that first three minutes of mixing and one of the ways that you can tell that it is ready is it has fully picked up and formed into a ball around the dough hook this is sometimes called the pick up stage when you're mixing bread because at the beginning it might even look soupy or soft but the more it mixes and kneads the more it comes together so after we've kind of fully picked up everything from the sides of the bowl then it's a good time to raise our speed and we'll mix for two minutes more at the end of the pickup stage the dough will still look a little shaggy or rough but after those two minutes of mixing it should be in pretty great shape it should be really nice and smooth and kind of a really perfect consistency so i'm ready to go ahead and transfer this i've got a greased bowl here and i'm just gonna transfer the whole dough kind of form it into a rough ball and put it in here and then we will let it rise for an hour or an hour and a half it's going to kind of depend on your environment if it's nice and hot and summery where you are it's probably only going to take an hour if you've got your ac blasting it might take more like an hour and a half so for this particular dough keep an eye out for it doubling in size i'm gonna just go ahead and form this into a bit of a ball kind of coat it in that oil it's looking beautiful so let's let this rise in a warm place for an hour an hour and a half i'm gonna go grab another dough we've already mixed so that we can move right onto shaping all right here is some dough that has already been rising it's really looking beautiful now bakers especially love to do things precise right so the next stage of this pita would be dividing it into eight even pieces if you want to be really really intense about this grab your kitchen scale and each of these eight pieces are going to be about 90 grams each but i want to also take this as an opportunity to show you how when i don't feel like getting out the scale and i still want them to be really really close to the same size how i like to divide it so first i'm going to give myself a little flour on the surface i'm actually using whole wheat flour as my bench flour today you could use all purpose or bread flour too i just kind of like that little bit of extra texture from the whole wheat after i lift it out of the bowl i try not to squish it too much i try to just keep it kind of in that even layer as it is and then i use my hands to form it into a bit of a rectangular shape i wanted to have straight sides and noticeable corners and i want it to be a roughly even thickness and that's because basically i'm just trying to make a shape that's easy to divide into eight even pieces and something that's like a rectangle is a lot simpler so i'll go ahead and cut this in half and what's cool is here i've got this bench knife here and it actually has measurements on it so i can even say okay this is about six inches so i need to be three and so i can just kind of mark it like that to get as much precision as possible without taking the time to get out the scale again and all of those things i just had an idea but the other thing you can do is instead of measuring it now we're just going to say okay we need to get four pieces from each of these so first divide it about in half as best as you can and then divide each of those halves in half now again this isn't going to be perfectly precise and these pitas are likely going to be a tiny bit different but in this application especially when i'm making it for a meal or something at home that's one time that for me i don't mind it being a little bit more rustic you know what we should we did to see oh we could do that you want to yeah okay where's your fault 90 grams that's not bad [Music] 90. this one's going to be too small ready yep yeah that one's a fatty so that was pretty good though that was pretty good and i'm not gonna change it i'm not gonna redo them but you could [Music] all right so now i'm just gonna round each of these into a ball this is in the formal bread baking method this is known as pre-shaping and what pre-shaping is is that during the dividing process you are working that dough a tiny bit so basically we want to give it a chance to be close to how its final shape is going to be but then give it a little bit of a chance to rest and relax continue proofing a little bit so what we're going to do is round each of these just place them on a lightly floured section of our work surface and then we'll leave them to rest for about 15 minutes and we'll come back to do the final shaping and you can cover them with a clean kitchen towel or some lightly greased plastic wrap just make sure that they're not too constricted we don't want to put anything on them too tight it's going to weigh them down we just want to kind of cover them to prevent the dough from drying out now with this last piece we've talked about this in our roll episode of bake it up a notch but let's just do a little refresher shall we of how to make a perfect round i like to start by folding the dough over onto itself a couple of times to kind of start getting the round shape then we flip it over so that seam is on the bottom and then we're really using this part of our hand kind of the outer heel of our hand and we're going to move our hand in this shape and the ideal is if you do this properly there should really be no visible seam on the bottom and there you go see it's just a little nothing it's perfect all right i'm going to cover this with a clean kitchen towel give these a short rest and we'll come back for our final shaping [Music] our pre-shaped pita rounds have been resting for 15 minutes so now let's get them shaped to go into the oven all right i always love unfolding the towel from dough because it's like untucking someone into bed it's like hello good morning so a few different tips about rolling out pita i like to roll them out on a piece of parchment paper and there's a few different reasons i like to do this on the parchment when a flat bread dough has something to cling to as you're rolling it out it allows you to roll it a little bit thinner and in this case we're trying to get these about six inches we don't want them to be too thin but you can literally see it's shifting on the parchment but at the same time then when i stop it's kind of attaching itself to that parchment see just like that see how it came up and the parchment so it's starting to get to this point where it's sticking to the parchment but that allows me to get to the thinness that i want so not only is the dough able to cling to it but it's also going to make it easier for us to bake this pita pita likes to be baked at a super high temperature we've got our oven preheating to 500 degrees fahrenheit and we have a baking steel or pizza stone in the oven if you don't have either of those things you can use a cast iron skillet and what that's going to do is that extra burst of heat is what's going to help that pita puff up and make the signature pocket in the center so we're going to just keep rolling these until it's about six inches that's about how wide these rectangles are so i'm about there already and i can just kind of move it to the side grab another piece and roll out my next pita and just keep on going until we have eight beautiful round pieces of pita [Music] so i've got a stack of eight beautiful pita here and i've got a nice hot preheated oven so what i like about using the parchment paper is it allows me to just slide these right into the oven and as it bakes it's going to naturally release itself from that parchment paper but also because the pitas might be have some slight variances or even your oven might have some slight variances it's really helpful to be able to just take out one if it's done because when you overcook pita it gets very crunchy and will miss that little bit of chew so we're gonna go ahead and start baking these in batches so let's head over to the oven all right so my oven is nice and hot i've got my baking steel in there i'm gonna go ahead and start by doing like three or four time and they take two to four minutes to get nice and puffed up and they are gonna get a little bit of browning as well [Music] all right so the goal here is to give them enough space that they have that circulation around them and also be careful if you're uneasy going into the oven i have hands that seem to have no feeling left in them not surprisingly so use just a long spatula to slide them in or if you have a pizza peel this is a great place to bring that out too [Music] [Music] all right these are looking really good i'm going to go ahead and pop them out come here you look at it so puffy and we do want to take them out before they get too much browning only because like i said that browning is going to equate to crispiness and we want light fluffy pita we don't necessarily want super duper crispy pita love you love you come here you love you too i know i need to save these so that we have plenty of pita to make sandwiches with but i have got to dive into one of these right now they smell so so good it's honestly the most incredible smell while they are baking hold on it's so hot hold on stop it look at that beautiful pocket that we have inside there for filling with things and most importantly we have this piece for me to eat right now [Music] it honestly doesn't need anything like i would love to have something to dip or slather but there is so much flavor and there is nothing like eating warm bread of any kind it is so so delicious and truly so so easy so i really hope that this inspires you to make some pita in your own kitchen thank you so much for joining me for this episode of bake it up a notch bite size where i brought out one of the first new recipes from my new cookbook savory baking i couldn't be more excited to share it as always this recipe is linked in the video description below i hope this inspires you to try making your own pita at home be sure to use hashtag bake it up a notch i always love to see what you are making until next time happy baking [Music]

Channel: Food52

Views: 83,888

Keywords: Food52, food, cooking, recipe, chef, foodie, cook, home cooking videos, erin mcdowell, bake it up a notch, easy baking recipes, pita bread, pita recipe, erin jeanne mcdowell, bake it up a notch bite size, pizza stone, baking steel, pita recipe for shawarma, erin mcdowell recipes, how to make pita bread, homemade pita bread, pita bread recipe, how to make pita bread from scratch, how to make pita bread puff up, how to make pita bread easy, homemade pita bread easy

Id: TBomsU6TvjQ

Length: 13min 48sec (828 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 02 2022