Flat Bread
I am not sure which cookbook was my first one—
Beard On Bread or the
Joy of Cooking.
I think it was the former. I still have both and the latter, being paperback is now held together by packing
tape having lost all binding integrity.
Bread was the first thing I ever cooked on my own. My Dad used to make bread and I loved the smell that permeated the house when he cooked it. I loved hearty, heavy hard to cut 100% while wheat bread that you could never get in a grocery store. My only choice was to bake it myself.
I have returned to baking bread but I am taking a slightly different view of it and look for a certain consistency and flavor. One bread that I find easy to make and versatile is flat bread. The following was adapted from Beard's Armenian Thin Bread recipe, where I converted the flours to weights and played with the types and ratios of flour. My goal was to make a flat bread that was cracker like, with more complex carbohydrates and would be good for dipping in my Humus. I achieved that and created the dough that I now use for all my pizza's, include my Vegan Pizza.
Yeast:
One package yeast
10 oz Warm Water
1 tsp Sugar
Dry ingredients:
4 oz Dark Rye Flour
4 oz Barley Flour
8 oz Bread Flour
1 1/2 tsp Salt
2 oz Olive Oil
Flat Bread toppings:
Poppy seeds
Sesame seeds
Dill Seeds
Place the yeast and sugar in warm (100°) water and put in a warm place to proof for 5 minutes.
Mix the flours and salt and wait for the yeast to get a nice thick head on it. When the yeast is ready add it and the oil to the flours and mix with a spoon. When mixed let the dough rest for about ten minutes.
Place it on a kneading surface and knead for about ten minutes until the dough is smooth and elastic. place it back in well oiled (olive oil) bowl a bowl for rising, cover with a warm damp rag and let it raise until double in size. This should take about ninety minutes in a 80° to 90° location.
Preheat the oven to 350° F for Flat Bread and per the directions in the pizza recipe for pizza dough.
When the dough has risen, cut the dough into pieces depending on your usage:
- Flat Bread
- Cut into thirds or quarters depending on what size baking sheets you have.
- Pizza
- Cut in half, assuming you are using the 10" x 14" stones recommended in the Pizza recipe. Return to the Pizza recipe, since the rest of this page is only for flat bread.
Using a rolling pin, roll the first section of dough until it is about 1/8" thick. Add you choice of herb toppings and continual to roll out until about 1/16" thick. Obviously they will be very fragile, but if you kneaded them for the full ten minutes they should hold together. Flour the top to keep it from sticking to itself, and fold into thirds (you may want to flour the exposed side as you do the fold.. Quickly transfer it to a baking sheet and unfold. Continue this process with the other sections.
The hardest part of this is to keep the dough a consistent thickness. Variations in the dough thickness when it is this thin shows up dramatically when backing. Thinner sections will be over done and thicker sections will be doughy.
After the dough is on the baking sheet using a knife or pizza cutter to score the dough into the size you want to serve. For this reason it is best to use non-walled baking sheets (unlike what I have in the pictures).
Bake these for about twenty minutes until they are golden brown. watch carefully since slight oven temperature differences may cause one to cook faster then the other.
The site www.nutritiondata.com is a wealth of information on foods. They provide the ability to add a recipe into their system and create a host of data about that recipe. Below is a copy of those results for this recipe.
The Good
This food is very low in Saturated Fat and Cholesterol. It is also a good source of Dietary Fiber,
Thiamin and Selenium, and a very good source of Manganese.
The Bad
None menitoned.
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