Sourdough Pita Bread & Dehydrated Starter

This week's mission: pita bread!

The Hubs & I recently got back from an anniversary trip down to the Yucatan Peninsula.  After a week of drinking and eating as much as we want, we decided we probably needed to make some healthier choices once we got home. After some brief discussions of keto and a 21 day Daniel Fast, we landed on the more sensible, sustainable choice of The Mediterranean Diet.  More fresh fruits & vegetables, simple ingredients, more fish, less red meat. 

This much deliciousness, 3 times a day, for 7 days: time for a reset.

 But then, the question came up: what do we do with the sourdough starter?  We both acknowledged that we'd been eating a lot more bread since I started making sourdough--which has been delicious, but probably also needs to be moderated as well. Bread definitely isn't forbidden with the Mediterranean Diet, and homemade sourdough bread which has been slow fermented and is more easily digestible makes more sense than store-bought bread with more processed ingredients.  But all of the sweet discard recipes we've been making for breakfasts and desserts? That should probably be ratcheted back.  I also had been meaning to dry out some of my starter for safe keeping, just in case something happened to it.

Sourdough Insurance.

Like most Americans, when I think about Mediterranean breads, pita is the first thing that comes to mind.  And it also seems pretty simple: make some dough, let it rise, then roll it out in to some flat tortilla-like rounds and toss in the oven to puff up.  We used Farmhouse on Boone's recipe. Ingredient-wise we didn't vary from this so you can click over there if you want to try it.

Unfortunately, my dough ended up very wet and sticky--likely because of high humidity here since it's summer.  I added a fair bit of flour when I was rolling these out into rounds...but then I also ran out of space to be able to flatten them out to 1/4 inch as in the recipe.  

When I went to try to get them off the cutting board after a 30 minute rest, they were all stuck solid.  After much scraping and cursing, what ended up on the pizza stone were irregular, oblong flatbreads, rather than pita.

Many choice words were flying around this kitchen...

After fighting with the first three, I balled all the remaining rounds up together with a little extra flour, kneaded, and then started pulling off smaller dough balls. With the main mass of dough over on one side of the board, I then had space to flour the surface and roll them out to 1/4 inch.  So I ended up baking these one at a time.  Not really ideal, but with the reworking & additional flour, they did finally start puffing up like beautiful little pita breads.

Final result was a little dry (probably because of adding so much flour on the back end just to keep them from sticking) but good flavor. Some were a little too thin and crumbly to use for pita pockets--they broke easily and leaked, but all in all, not terrible for a first attempt.  Will I try again??? TBD.  As you know, I like trying new recipes, and as it turns out, there's a TON of Mediterranean breads that aren't pita.  In the meantime, it was delicious with hummus and worked fairly well as a pita pocket for these deviled egg salad sandwiches inspired by my friend Jo. (Basically, regular egg salad but with less mayo, more mustard, and diced homemade dill pickles in it.)