Just tried these last night, mainly because I watched Martin Philip's YouTube video he did in April with his kids, where they made them with some yummy filling ideas. So I followed your recipe for Golden Pita Bread (https://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/golden-pita-bread-recipe), making one change. I have been a huge advocate of using poolish in my bread recipes wherever possible - for very little effort it adds soooooo much flavour. (I got the idea from Jeffrey Hamelman's book "Bread" - another King Arthur connection!) My poolish is 200gr flour, 200gr water, 1gr fresh yeast, sits for 12-16 hours. Then all you do is subtract 200gr flour and 200gr water from the basic recipe when putting the final dough together.

Then thankfully I read through this blog post and the comments before I did the bake, and I ended up following Cathie's comment from Sept 12, 2008 (yikes, 12 years ago!) where she suggested cooking on a rack. So I just put the rolled out dough on a simple cooling rack, then put that into the oven.They took about 4 mins to pop, then I gave them another couple of minutes to get golden brown. (See https://www.kingarthurflour.com/blog/2008/08/01/wheres-the-pop-in-my-pi… for Cathie's original comments.)

And hey presto, they all popped! And they were *super yummy*, soft and warm and soooooo much better than anything yo could buy. I have baked a lot of bread of various types these last few months, and these were in the family's top two, along with bagels.

So my advice to folks would be, use a wire rack to cook them in the oven, rather than on a stone or tray, and if you have 10 minutes to spare the day before, make a poolish!

• Reply