I have been feeling, in general, that I prefer the flavor of bread made with sourdough over that made with yeast. So, I’ve been experimenting with replacing yeast with sourdough in some recipes, and here are a couple of attempts.

The basic idea for both attempts is to make half of the King Artur pita recipe from the class I took last week with Chris and Mike, but replace the yeast with a couple of tablespoons of sourdough starter. The rising time was extended as long as was necessary to get the dough to double. Everything else was the same as the recipe.

The first set was challenged primarily (I think) by the fact that my sourdough starter hadn’t been used in at least three months, so it was pretty “sleepy”. I left the dough to rise for 12 hours, and it did rise, but I didn’t get the impressive pillowy puffing-up that we got with the yeast version. It had air bubbles, but not one big pillowy pocket. It was soft, airy, and wonderful, and did have much more flavor than the yeast variety.

Then I tried again a week later and got the pillowy result I was hoping for!

This time, I let the dough rise for 6 hours (I think?). The only difficulty I had was that the big air pocket inside didn’t happen evenly between the top and bottom layers of the pita. You can kinda see it in the photo on the right side… the top layer is thin and the bottom layer is thicker. Some research on the interwebs seems to hint that this could be because of a temperature differential between the top and bottom (baking stone) in the oven. I dunno, maybe?

Last thoughts on these:

• Because i feed my sourdough starter with 50% whole wheat flour and 50% white bread flour, I wonder if part of what I prefer about sourdough bread flavor is the whole wheat (in addition to the flavor that the sourdough itself provides). In this recipe, the sourdough starter was just two tablespoons, but you can see that the color of the resulting bread shows some flecks of whole wheat.
• This recipe really is easy, and the results really are better than store-bought. But, I have to put in a plug for the pita from Cafe Barada. I don’t know for sure that they make it themselves, but I think so. It’s wonderful, and during the pandemic they were selling it in large quantities as a grocery item. Anytime I order their hoummos (which is the best hoummos I’ve had, anywhere, ever) I always buy extra pita.