My daughter is in Cambodia for the summer working on her master's project.    I asked her if there was good bread in Cambodia.   I guess I was expecting some cool and unknown to me Asian varieties.   She surprised me by saying that there was a lot of very good very cheap French bread.   I asked her to send me some pictures to post on this site.   Here is what she sent:

From the looks of it, I think she's right about the quality.   Now I have to go back to David Snyder's post on shaping and see how to recreate the fabulous shapes of these batards.   I also like the cross scoring on the last one.    Any ideas about what these might be?  -Varda

Right, so about six months ago I was in Cambodia, in Sihanoukville to be precise where I happened to stay at a guesthouse called Thida's inn. Thida the lovely lady who ran it, was a rather good cook and one day someone said, "have you tried the chicken wrap?" no I replied, is that on the menu?

No she replied, someone showed her how to make it, he was south american I think, try it.

I did. I don't precisely know what she used to make it, a kind of magic I think, all I know is it's one of the greatest items of food I have ever tasted, I generally ate at least two a day and on balance I would love to make them again.

So one day I sauntered into the kitchen and said, thida, show me how you make your chicken wrap, which she did, unfortunately while I saw and video'd how she made the contents of the wrap, she'd premade the wraps themselves the day before and refridgerated them, she simply grabbed a precooked one, dropped it onto an ungreased hot plate and warmed it up. I asked her how she made the wrap and she said it was exactly the same as the pizza bases she made only thinner obviously.

So last weekend I decided to give the pizza base thing a go, I grabbed some recipes of the net (I never got hers unfortunately) did some dough, rolled some out and threw it onto a hot plate and... I made naan bread, well it certainly looked like naan bread, tasted nice, great, but not the magic wrap.

So I through the second one in the oven and I got.... pita bread! hurray I can now make naan bread and pita bread but no $*U%($ng wrap!

So I am after some advice, the recipe I used was basically flour, yeast, sugar, water, salt. I heated the flour and water before hand, chucked it alltogether kneaded it, let it rise for an hour then kneaded it some more, rolled it out and cooked it. So I'm wondering about some alternate recipes and if anyone has any ideas, would baking powder make a difference vs yeast? I really don't know, any help appreciated.

Rob