It’s been a couple of weeks or so since my last post. I took some time out over the Easter break to entertain visitors, plant up new window boxes and generally have a relaxing time. I’ve also been doing a little baking experimentation. Before making the pitta breads described in my post It's a pitta I didn't try this earlier I did quite a lot of research into recipes. Many of them indicated that plain or strong flour could be used. The use of plain flour seemed a little odd to me, but if you’ve been following this blog you’ll know my knowledge and experience of bread-making, although growing, remain somewhat limited. Overall, therefore, since pitta are flatbreads and the yeast-to-flour ratio is high, I concluded that the type of flour would not be as relevant as it would for a pan loaf.
I had bought a bag of wholemeal self-raising flour for a recipe that I ended up not using and I didn’t want it to go to waste. When I buy pitta breads from the shop, I frequently prefer wholemeal ones. Taking the information at face value, therefore, I tried out my recipe with this flour; if the difference between strong and weak didn’t matter, I figured that the difference between self-raising and plain flour wouldn’t matter here either.
If you like your pittas to resemble large thin oatcakes, this is definitely the recipe for you! They tasted lovely, but the dough was hard and difficult to knead, there was not even an inkling of a rise and there was not a chance in Hell of splitting the finished breads to fill them. Perhaps I should have donated them to the Olympic Games discus competitors…
I thought perhaps that using half wholemeal and half strong white flour would solve the problem. Indeed, it did improve things a little, and the bread ended up a little lighter, but remained almost impossible to split, having few air pockets and a slightly crumbly texture.
Finally, I just went right out there and bought some strong brown flour. From the word go the dough felt different – smoother, lighter, more elastic and more malleable. The pittas came out delightfully soft and easy to split. One thing of note, though, was that they didn’t puff up in the oven quite as impressively as the white ones did. Rather, they developed multiple large air bubbles. When reheated, though, these popped back up and the small areas in between offered only slight resistance so they were still easy to split. My conclusion, therefore, is that pittas do need to be made with strong flour to be able to hold any rise achieved. I have amended the tutorial posted in It's a pitta I didn't try this earlier to reflect this finding.
But what to do with the bag of self-raising wholemeal flour? Well, as I had some lemons in the fridge, I created the recipe below for lemon and pine nut muffins. These were much more successful than the self-raising-flour pitta breads and go rather well with a cup of tea and a good book!
Lemon and pine nut muffins
125 g plain white flour
125 g wholemeal flour
100 g caster sugar
3 tsp baking powder
Half tsp salt
175 ml milk
75 ml vegetable oil
1 egg
Rind and juice of 2 lemons
75 g pine nuts
Heat the oven to 200ºC/400ºF/gas mark 6. Grease a 12-muffin baking tray or line it with paper bun cases. In a bowl, combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, lemon rind and salt. In a separate bowl beat together the milk, oil, egg and lemon juice. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and stir gently until the dry ingredients are moistened, but do not beat; the mixture should remain lumpy. Gently stir in the pine nuts. Fill each bun case 3/4 full and bake for 20–25 min or until a cocktail stick inserted in the centre comes out clean and the cakes feel firm. Leave to cool on a cooling rack.
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