Whole Wheat Pitas

Tonight's recipe is courtesy of Emeril Lagasse from the Planet Green website (found here).

The process: I followed this recipe as written and ran into problems right away. The dough was very sticky and a good bit of it wound up under my fingernails. I ended up adding extra flour while I was kneading (once I removed half of the dough from my hands), probably 1/3-1/2 cup.

The next "problem" I ran into (which was more likely a typo in the recipe) is that the dough made 12 2-ounce balls (using a food scale for consistency), not 16. I'm suggesting it's a typo as opposed to chef's error since it made exactly 12 balls, with no dough leftover.

The recipe called for an oven temperature of 500°, which is just a tad frightening, but hey, anything for homemade pitas. I was able to bake 2 pitas at a time on my upside-down baking sheet. There's a satisfying little "pop!" when the pitas puff up, creating that trademark pocket. Since I had to open the oven so often, I ended up turning the temperature up to 525°. That way the actual temperature stayed where it needed to be, and all 12 pitas came out well. I'll tell you this: baking these things is not for the faint of heart...that oven is HOT!The results: They look beautiful, if I do say so myself, golden brown and flour-dusted. The texture is very nice: soft with just the right amount of chewiness. They're very salty, however, and next time I'll definitely be cutting back to 1 teaspoon.

The skinny: As I made them, each pita has 160 calories, 3.2 g fat, 390 mg sodium (!), 28.3 g carbohydrate, 1.1 g fiber, and 4 g protein. (With only 1 tsp salt in the recipe, sodium content would be reduced to 196 mg.)