flatbread baking

I'm catching up on posts that I made to my personal blog about baking but started neglecting this blog. So here's a flatbread post and picture from June 2007.



This weekend I played around with flatbread. Basic recipe as follows

18 oz bread flour
4 Tablespoons powdered milk
4 Tablespoons sugar
4 Tablespoons oil
1 Tablespoon yeast
1 Tablespoon Baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 1\2 cups water

Dump into a mixer, turn on the dough hook for about 5-8 minutes until thoroughly blended into a wet dough. Spoon out into an oiled bowl, cover and let rise for 1 hour (I put it in the oven with a bowl of hot water). After first rise, dump onto a floured surface and knead a bit, divide into 8 equal portions. Now is a good time to turn the oven to 550 (remove the water bowl if you used one), with the oven racks either centered or spaced for 2 sheet pans. Roll the dough into 8 balls and let rest for about 10-15 minutes (the amount of time it takes for my oven to preheat.) Press/roll the dough into flat discs about 6-8 inches across, and fit 2 per sheet pan. Bake for about 4-5 minutes, if doing two sheet pans at once you'll need to rotate them after 2 minutes. They go from almost done to brown quickly, so watch them closely. After baking the first batch, remove them from the sheets and put the second batch on, being careful not to burn yourself (I have enough sheet pans to do all of them on different sheets, but who wants to wash 4 cookie sheets.) Using baking parchment makes it easy to unpan them.

These are great with gyro meat, dipped in hummus or even with pizza toppings. I must admit, these are my first real successful flatbreads, and I've made batches using amaranth flour as 25% of the total flour, but regular bread flour works great.