Cutting Room Floor: Make Bad Bread
So this first issue of TITLE was originally going to be about bread. The staff of life. Gluten-free or otherwise. Still is, in some ways. Bread being a metaphor for the means of surviving in a very nitty-gritty, dat-to-day basis. The money behind the art. The things you do to keep the lights on.
Part of this was my mother’s recipe for pita bread. I was on a bread-baking kick for awhile there and I still advocate it to anyone who hasn’t made a loaf or some flatbread. It’s an experience of demystifying some of the basics, getting a feel for the intersection of art and science in any act of creation. What’s great about bread is that it’s very much an artifact of it’s inputs, craft, and setting. The yeast, the flour, and water interact with the kneading the humidity and the heat to produce something that is unique to that time and place. It’s a food and a photograph.
At any rate, here’s the missing recipe. It’s not an ideal recipe it’s just the bare minimum of something functional that will make an edible product. The idea is to cross that line and make something Not That Great but to Make Something. The perfect is the enemy of the good and all that.
So here’s a recipe for some reasonably edible pitas:
Pita Recipe
3 cups flour
2 tsp salt
2 tsp yeast
1.5 cups water
combine. knead.
put in bowl.
Let it rise.
45 minutes
Punch it down, knead it out. Wrap it up and put it in the fridge.
-Or-
Go directly to dividing it into 5 pieces. Make pieces into flat circles. Think pizzas or pitas. Flatbread. Spritz with water if you have that ability. Let that rise in a warm space. Should take about as long as it takes to preheat your 500 degree oven. Bake 5 minutes, check it at 3 min. (Your oven temp is probably wrong, no matter what. Whatever)
Pull them out, put them on a cooling rack if you have one or just some place that is not an oven. There you go, you’ve got bread. Dip it something, slather it in butter, or just eat it in miserable poverty.