pukka pitta

It was third time lucky with my adventures in experimental carbohydrate cookery.  Last night I tried making pitta bread, and succeeded at my first attempt.  The finished product puffed up magnificently, looked just like bread, and tasted jolly nice.  After the couscous experience and the rice pudding episode, I was half expecting the dough to turn out bafflingly runny or unmanageably dry, take hours to prove before showing any signs of life, and for the resulting bread to taste like cardboard, or a round cut from an ironing blanket.*

I looked for a recipe in a couple of my bread books, but neither even included pitta in the index, so I hunted around online.  One recipe measured everything in cups, which was no good to me.  I am not an American, and cups are what I drink tea out of.  Paul Hollywood put nigella seeds in his, which was far too jazzy.  I decided to go with Dan Lepard of the Guardian, who always sounds sensible in his articles, and has done whole series on baking, while wondering why I hadn't just bought a stoneground loaf when I was in Tesco the previous day.

Dan's pitta bread is made with a mixture of strong and ordinary plain flour.  As well as salt the dough contains sugar, which I wasn't expecting, and sunflower oil.  I didn't have any easy-blend yeast, so used my normal dried yeast instead, and started it off for a few minutes in the tepid water.  The dough felt springy, elastic and alive almost immediately.  The recipe requires minimal kneading, and total proving time of just an hour.  I knocked the dough back the recommended number of times, but not at the specified intervals, because I was busy blogging between bouts of kneading.  The breads were cooked as high up the top, hot oven of the Aga as I could get them, and we ate the first ones fresh from the oven with a Diana Henry recipe for peas and broad beans with chorizo and lemon juice.

They reheated well today, and the recipe says you can even freeze them.  Certainly they are a quantum nicer than shop bought ones, and a method of making bread that means you can have something on the table in less than two hours from when you first thought of it is extremely useful. So many breads seem to require you to have started before breakfast if you wanted anything by lunchtime, or to have begun about three hours before you did if you don't want to be sitting up until midnight waiting until the dough is ready for you to actually cook it.  So thank you, Dan, and I have added your baking book to my Amazon wishlist.

Meanwhile in the garden the Systems Administrator finally ventured to have a bonfire, and managed to dispose of a good portion of the great pile of stuff waiting to be burned, including some but by no means all of the long grass that was cut down earlier in the week.  It's a relief to see the heap starting to disappear, without taking the polytunnel or the nearest shed with it.  There is plenty more to come where that lot came from, as I've started on the back of the Eleagnus hedge, now we've cut the long grass on the daffodil lawn and I can get to it, and there will be trailer loads of ivy to come off the hedge around the long bed.

I have achieved the equivalent indoors feat, and tidied up my desk, which had got to the point where its entire surface was covered in a six inch deep layer of books, magazines, letters, leaflets, catalogues, and files.  Plus a screwdriver, a small and unsatisfactory digital radio with a broken aerial, a tray of daffodil bulbs, a collection of biros (all of which amazingly still worked), two rather flabby rubber bands, two memory sticks, two hole punches, and quite a lot of fluff.  Some people with messy desks claim to be able to find everything on them, and academic research has backed some of their claims up, but my desk was not like that.  I could not find anything, including the letter telling me at what time and in what place I was supposed to be doing Tuesday's talk, and which I have now discovered.

The surface of the desk, now I am reacquainted with it, is a medium brown wooden veneer, from Ikea.  I dusted off the worst of the fluff, respectfully.

*I nicked that phrase from Susan Coolidge.  It is good enough to deserve an outing every now and then.