Over the long weekend (yes, it was five days due to the confluence of Kurbon Bayram and Turkmen Neutrality Day just before a weekend) I did a little baking. OK, a lot of baking. We had some of our neighbors over for dinner one night and I made pitas. A really good recipe out of one of our favorite cookbooks, the American Wholefoods Cookbook by the Goldbecks. They have the baking time way off, though. They say 10-15 minutes in a 375 oven. I put our pizza stone in the oven and cranked it up to 500. The pitas took about 1.5 minutes each. They puff up into balloons, as you can see. I only had one fail to puff, but it was still tasty.
I also did our normal whole wheat sandwich bread on Sunday. Usually I make a sponge (yeast, water and half the flour) the night before to let the yeasts develop some flavor. This time I threw it together Sunday morning as a straight dough--dump the ingredients in the mixer and have at. Oh, yeah, I cheated and used the mixer this time. Still turned out quite nice. Not as flavorful as usual, but nice.
I took the shortcuts on the sandwich bread so I could spend my time on potica. I made two very large loaves, everything by hand. The bread part came out maybe the best I've ever done, but the filling didn't have quite enough spices in it for my taste. Not bad, quite good, really, just not quite enough cinnamon. And I wasn't paying quite enough attention so they wound up a bit dark. OK, really dark. I might have to try another batch next week, that is, if we can get through all of the holiday sweets without going into sugar shock.
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