cafe barada

Sourdough Pita x2

/ Susie / Leave a comment
First try, March 15, with sleepy sourdough

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.

Second try, March 23

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.

Baklava

/ Susie / Leave a comment

This is actually my third try at baklava. I didn’t take any photos of the first two, because they were generally awful. The whole process was awful, and apparently I didn’t want any evidence of their existence.

The problem with the first two attempts was that I tried to make it inside of a rectangular pyrex dish. Maybe for someone who knows what they’re doing this would have been fine. But for me, I had major problems getting the thinly-rolled dough to behave properly in the dish. It tended to contract or otherwise not behave when buttered, yielding an ugly mess. I think it was a mistake to trim the rolled dough before trying to place it in the dish? Maybe having extra would have helped. I don’t know

Anyway, this third attempt was more successful because I ditched the pyrex dish in favor of a sheet pan. I rolled the phyllo sheets out and just built the baklava layers on the pan. The dough behaved better and stayed thin, and I was still able to pour the syrup on and have most of it stay within the pastry. One downside was that I couldn’t use a knife to cut the diamond pattern, because I didn’t want to cut the silicone pad. Instead, I used my plastic bench scraper to make the cuts. In hindsight, I could have built the baklava on parchment and then used a knife.

TBH, my conclusion from all this is that, for baklava, I don’t think it’s worth making the phyllo dough. Baklava really needs the paper-thin sheets that you get with the bought stuff. No matter what, mine weren’t going to be that thin!

I do wonder if the Paul Hollywood cornflour method would work. I’m tempted to try, but maybe not motivated enough. Here’s why: I bought a piece of baklava from Cafe Barada a few days ago, and it was just sublime. I mean, it was light, delicate, only gently sweet. Just perfect. Why work hard to make something so inferior? This is Cafe Barada’s baklava. I mean, look at this thing of beauty…

Cafe Barada’s baklava

Maybe it’s worth it to make homemade spanakopita triangles, but not baklava.