Maybe the biggest thing that prevents home bakers from striking out and making their own pita bread is the fear that getting the "pocket" to form is somehow difficult. Actually, pita "pocket bread" is a great example of a fault being turned into a feature. If any of you remember my focaccia and ciabatta escapades, you know that defeating a dough's tendency to puff up into a pillow is a big part flatbread shaping technique. Otherwise, the top crust simply wants to lift right off the rest of the bread. To prevent that, the baker pokes the dough in several spots in an attempt to stick the top crust down. Alternately, he pokes holes in (or "docks") the dough to create vents through which some of the steam can escape. With pita, "pillowing" isn't a flaw, it's the whole point. So don't call it faulty. Call it traditional.

I'm a perfectionist about a lot of things, but pain à l'ancienne isn't one of them. I take the term "rustic" seriously here, so the more oddly-shaped, bulbous and goofy these things turn out, the better. I don't even care if my dough portions are the same weight...is that gettin' nutty or what?

This bread is basically a messed-with ciabatta. If it proofed longer, it would be that very thing. However I think it's a pretty terrific (and terrifically easy) thing as it is. Outside of the no-knead breads that are so popular right now, this bread probably provides the best effort-to-return ratio of any bread I've ever tried. And while it isn't quite as easy as a no-knead, it delivers a whole lot more flavor and a better crust. Even baking without a professional oven, you get an open crumb like this:

Need I say more? Let's get started. Begin by getting that ice water ready.

Is it cold? I mean is it really cold? Then put your dry ingredients into the bowl of your mixer.

Add your water (straining out the ice of course) and mix on low for about a minute, until everything's nice and wet, like this.

Put on the dough hook, turn the mixer up to medium and knead for no more than five minutes. By then though dough should pull away from the sides but still stick to the bottom of the bowl, like this:

Scoop the dough out into a rising container or a large bowl. Use your hand, it's the best way. Just shape your fingers like a shovel and scoop. Don't be shy — get in there!

You'll have a little more than a quart of dough. Now then, promptly, and I mean don't even take time out to wash your hands, stash the container in the coldest part of the fridge: bottom shelf in the back. Shut the door.

Thus endeth day one. The next day, take the dough out of the fridge. It will probably have risen at least a little.

Let it rise for about three hours (preheating your oven to 500 after two of those hours), until it's twice its former volume and nice and bubbly, about like so:

Amply flour a wooden board. Amply.

Turn out the dough and sprinkle it with more flour.

Shape the dough into a rough rectangle, then with a bench scraper, cut the dough in half. Then cut each of those halves into three pieces.

Lay the pieces out, stretching them slightly, onto pieces of parchment that are sitting on the back sides of sheet pans or cookie sheets. These will serve as your peels for laying the bread in the oven.

When ready to bake, slide the loaves into the oven, paper and all. Do this by planting the far edge of the pan at the far edge of the baking stone, then just slip the pan out from under. It'll be hot, but don't worry, you can do it.

Do the steaming thing as in the post How to Make Your Home Oven More Brick Oven-Like, then bake for 10 minutes. Rotate the loaves (which is easy because they're sitting on paper...you can just grab the curled up corner of the parchment with your fingers), then bake about 15 minutes more. You loaves will look something like this:

Nice and golden and crispy, with that nice "this is artisan bread" dusting of flour on the top. Take the loaves out with tongs, throw away the parchment and bake the other three loaves, which won't have suffered any from their extended proofing. Cool on a rack for at least 20 minutes, then go get the butter.

But how about that for easy, eh? Minimal kneading, idiot-proof rising and no shaping to speak of. For the result you get, this is a truly amazing bread. All courtesy of Mr. Reinhart. Thank you, Peter!

Here's one key observation I've made after months of fiddling with my new brick oven: these things get really, really hot inside. So hot in fact that a cheerful round of bread dough can be transformed into lump of smoking, blistered ash in as little as eight minutes. But what else to do but risk it when your dough is over-proofing but your oven hasn't yet cooled down to baking temperature? This is the problem I referenced a few weeks ago when I talked about the difficulties of marrying a firing schedule to a rising schedule: the dough and the oven don't always meet at the right moment in time. A more fortunate friend, who showed up late (after the oven had cooled down a couple hundred degrees), took home something that actually resembled bread:

Nice herbed ciabatta. I think I'll be late to my own bread baking party next time.

I think a big part of the reason that cookbook authors have favored stiffer, tigher doughs over the years is because home bakers tend to be less comfortable working with slack ones. Wet dough tends to be sticky if it isn't well-floured, and that just plain flusters some folks. If there's a trick to handling wetter dough, it's simply to remember that there's no such thing as using too much flour during the cutting and portioning part of the baking process. My hamburger bun, ciabatta, focaccia, and pizza doughs swim in extra flour on my work board, and are none the worse the wear for it. Yeah, sure I get flour everyewhere, but that's how I know I'm a baker, dernit.

If you've had a chance to try making pain à l'ancienne this week, you've undoubtedly noticed one thing: this dough is very wet. It sticks to everything including hands, bowls, implements, the table, you name it. Thus you must be prepared to spread plenty of extra flour around. You must also be prepared for imperfect (a.k.a. "rustic") loaves. Why is the dough so wet? Simply because wetness (or high hydration in the super-fly, keepin'-it-real parlance of professional bakery) translates into big interior holes, or open crumb.

Handling a dough this wet can be tricky for anyone new to it. The consolation is that pain à l'ancienne bakes up beautifully regardless of its final shape, be that roundish, squarish, oblong, or something like the state od Rhode Island. Now me, I'm not a big fan of the "torpedo" shape that the author of the recipe calls for. What I do is push the dough into a rough rectangle, cut it into three strips with a wetted bench scraper, and lay the strips out across the length of an upturned, parchment-covered cookie sheet. The end result is three skinny loaves of a girth somewhere between a thick breadstick and a baguette. But do whatever you want. Small rounds, bun-sized ovals, you really can't go wrong. But be advised that whatever shape you decide upon, your loaf will ultimately come out somewhat flat and ciabatta-like (perfect for sandwiches).

As far as handling, the way to manage pain à l'ancienne dough is to avoid actually grasping it. With well-floured hands, treat it like the proverbial hot potato and never let stay in contact with your fingers too long. Thinking about it, the gestures that I make when I shape it are similar to tossing a salad by hand: furtive little lifting, pushing and pinching motions that don't so much "shape" the loaf as corral it into form. You'll be amazed at how much extra flour you're going to need, but don't worry. It's that residual flour that gives you that much-coveted powdery, Old-World artisan bread look.

Our neighbor girls (ages 8 and 11) are prone to wander by every so often, especially in the summer. The older of the two has a knack for showing up whenever focaccia is about to go in the oven. She peers at the sheet pan, wrinkles her nose and says: “So you’re making that snot bread again?” This is the sad state of modern youth, ladies and gentlemen. But heck I’ll eat hers (hang on, who ever said she was entitled to a share to begin with?).

In fairness I have to concede that focaccia in its raw state does look and feel a bit…snotty. But you can hardly help it. Focaccia is made from the wettest dough in the bread baking world, up to 45% water. That’s 80% in so-called “baker’s percentages” where every ingredient is measured relative to the total flour weight (so if you have a recipe that contains 10 ounces of flour and eight ounces of water, the “hydration” is 80%).

Dealing with wet doughs usually requires copious amounts of flour. Focaccia demands oil, which yields a big slippery, sloppy mass that doesn’t like to take orders. The good news is you don’t have to do much to the dough once it’s oiled. You just spread it out on the pan, tugging at the edges until you have full coverage.

Just a few words of advice for your focaccia. First, be gentle with it. It’s easy to de-gas focaccia dough. But by the same token you want to be sure to dimple it with your finger tips before it goes in the oven. Flat, poofy breads like focaccia and ciabatta fall prey to overly large bubbles just under their skins. If gas is allowed to collect like this, the loaf puffs up like a pillow in the oven, lifting the top crust right off the bread. This, she is no good. So dimple, dimple, dimple every two inches or so to stick the top crust down.

Since focaccia is a very easy bread to overproof, you want to stick tightly to the rising schedule as written. Also, you should expect the bread to stick fairly tightly to the sheet pan, not matter how much oil you use. Just don’t start scraping until the bread has had a chance to cool or it tends to fall and compact a bit.

Lastly, I’ve been asked more than a few times what type of olive oil to use. The answer is: the cheap stuff. The subtleties of great oil are obliterated by heat. No need to waste great drizzling oil on focaccia, especially if you’re using a powerful herb like rosemary. That’s it! Thank you and good night.

A word to the wise on ciabatta: don't let this bread overproof. Stick to a strict 30-minute timetable as the recipe suggests. I let mine sit for too long before putting it in the oven, and it developed too much gas. The result was a giant, brittle, hollow pillow. That'll teach me to bake and talk on the phone at the same time.

Making ciabatta again today (God love the home office). I'm getting seriously addicted to this bread, though you need a lot of excess flour around to manage it, which leaves my kitchen looking like the aftermath of the pie fight from the movie The Great Race. Still, it's got a flavor and texture I could get used to (my toddler daughter is already demanding it for breakfast). Slightly less wet, I think this dough would also make fantastic pizza crust.

Like this week's bread, ciabatta, pecan pie is a baked good without much of a pedigree. There are no known recipes for pecan pie that date back further than 1925. The reason for this is fairly straightforward: corn syrup, one of pecan pie's primary ingredients, wasn't in common use before that time.

Though corn syrup was invented in the 1880's, it wasn't marketed widely as a sweetner until the turn of the century when Karo hit the market. Even so, it took another few decades before it came into common household use. There is a school of thought that attributes the invention of pecan pie to the wife of a Karo marketing executive. Certainly, Karo has done much to popularize the pie over the years.

Then there's the competing theory that pecan pie was the invention of poor southern folk, who fashioned it out of readily available ingredients (inexpensive corn syrup and wild-grown pecans). Still other theories say the inventors were French immigrants in New Orleans.

Me, I have my doubts about them all. For while pecan pie itself may be new, there is a Western tradition of tooth-achingly sweet pies that's as old as sugar refining itself. Karo syrup, let's not forget, was only the latest sweetner to arrive on the scene in the 1920's. Before pecan (also known as "Karo") pie, there was molasses pie, sorgum pie, treacle tart, sugar pie, chess pie and shoofly pie. All are alike in that they are thinly-veiled excuses for heaping almost pure sugar on a dessert plate. The only difference between them is the type of thickener they employ. For pecan pie it's eggs, molasses and sorghum pie use flour, treacle tart is thickened with bread crumbs, etc, etc.

No, it seems that as long as there's been sweet stuff around, people have been divising ways to consume it in bulk. The Arabs, who were the first to refine sugar back in about 700 A.D. were known for several varieties of all-sugar pastries. And let's not forget the Greeks, who consumed vast amounts of honey in concoctions like this. Oh yes, my friends, we may condemn ourselves for the way we slurp down soft drinks, but the human sweet tooth is a timeless thing.

When I say ciabatta is only a fifty year-old bread, what I really mean is it's only been fifty years that ciabatta has been eaten in its current form. That is, in small slipper-sized loaves (that's what the word ciabatta actually means, slipper). Classically, bread in Italy didn't come in such small iterations. It was almost always the big stuff.

The reason, because in most parts of Italy, particularly rural, peasant areas, bread was traditionally baked in community ovens. Not bakeries, mind you, just communal baking places where women would bring their pre-shaped loaves of dough to be baked. It's a system you can still see in operation in some places. Yet community ovens are now used more out of nostalgia than necessity.

Modern media imagery has conditioned us to think of Italy in terms of abbondanza!. And it's true that today, Italy does enjoy everything the fruits of modern agricultural practices have to offer. For the vast majority of its history, however, the opposite was true. Italy was a land of poor people and poor resources, where starvation was commonplace.

Most of our perceptions of European bakery traditions are influenced by images of the French and the daily (sometimes twice daily) baguette. This is a very modern idea. Fresh-baked bread was by no means a daily occurrence for the French or anybody else prior to about 90 years ago. In Italy as in most places bread was baked about once a week, which is why traditional breads are so large. They had to last many, many days.

If you've ever wondered why Italian cuisine has so many recipes for old or stale bread, this is the reason. It wasn't until Italians made their way to the New World that they started eating fresh bread every day, piling cheese on their veal cutlets, and eating pasta for a main course. For turn-of-the-century Italian immigrants, it was America that was the true land of abbondanza!

There are three loaves of ciabatta proofing in the kitchen right this very second. I can hardly wait to bake'em! Though to be honest I had more than a little trouble handling such a slack, sticky dough. It's been a while for me. But, a few times through the process is all it'll take to get my sea legs back (a bakery I used to work in produced stirato, a close relative of ciabatta, every night).

What I find so interesting about ciabatta is the way in which it's taken over the Italian bread world in such a short period of time. In 1960, scarcely a soul outside the Lake Como region had ever even heard of the stuff. Yet here we are not even fifty years later and ciabatta is practically the national bread of Italy. What's behind its appeal?

One guess is that it's mostly crust, which makes it both very textural and very flavorful. Being as flat a it is, it's also great for sandwiches. You just slice it horizontally and pile on the good stuff. You get plenty of great bread flavor without having to eat a large volume of crumb.

Then again you can just cut it in pieces and dip it in oil and pepper flakes. Which is what I'm going to do in about sixteen minutes.

It's Derby week down here in Louisville, so it only seems fitting that we do something Derby-ish. Now maybe it's because I'm a newbie in Kentucky, but I have yet to discover what a "true" Derby pie is. For some it's a kind of toll house pie without the brown sugar. For others it's simply a pecan pie with chocolate chips. Then there's the top-secret, trademarked DERBY-PIE® which somehow manages to be a combination of both. Since I have yet to form an opinion on this (I have to think carefully, people take both pie and the Derby extremely seriously around here), I'm going to go with what sounds the most fun, and I think that's

Bourbon Chocolate Pecan Pie

That seems pretty Kentucky to me, I don't care what the purists say. And this week, you have my solemn vow that I'm going to finally make and write about

Ciabatta

I have a poolish starter in the fridge even as we speak. I'm making it today! I swear!

This week's theme is foods with double consonants. In that spirit I have two Italian offerings for you. This week's pastry project is a simple-but-elegant Italian stand-by known as

Panna Cotta

This week's bread is the same as last week's because well, I did absolutely nothing with it.

Ciabatta

I promise I'll make more headway this time around. I just get so distracted. One thing that these two recipes have in common is that they're both relatively new inventions. Neither has much history attached. But never fear, I never have much difficulty running my mouth.

Hope you had a happy Easter! Indeed I did, but now I've got more chocolate on my hands than I can stand. The wife is busy squirreling her share away in hiding spots all over the house. Me, I'd rather fiddle around with it. I'm going to make some:

Peanut Butter Cups

And since my baguette starter turned rank in the fridge while I was gone this weekend, I think I'm going to change nations entirely, breadwise. I haven't made any of this in years:

Ciabatta

Yes, I know, two King Arthur recipes. I swear I'm not endorsing them. They just put good stuff online.