Mix flour and salt in a large bowl. Add 5-5 ½ c. warm water slowly and mix with hands.

In a small bowl, combine yeast, tepid water, and sugar. Stir and let sit until foamy.

Once yeast has dissolved, add yeast mixture to flour mixture.

Knead the dough with your hands, incorporating all of the dry and wet ingredients until you get a shaggy consistency that can be divided into two sections for kneading by a machine mixer with the dough attachment. Or continue to knead by hand. Dough should be moist, soft, smooth and pull away from the sides of the bowl when sufficiently kneaded.

Rub butter all over the inside of the bowl where you will let the dough rise. (A stainless steel or glass bowl works best.)

Put dough inside greased bowl and turn over once or twice to coat outside of dough with a thin film of butter and then cover bowl with plastic wrap and moistened tea towels. Spray the inside of the plastic wrap with cooking spray to keep dough from sticking.

Put the dough in a warm place to rise. E.g. You could turn on the oven for a minute or two and then turn off to let the dough rise in there. You could also add a pan of boiling water to the bottom rack of the oven. (Reminder: Don't leave the oven on!)

Let dough rise until double in size.

Turn over dough. Punch down. Then cover and rise again until double in size.

After second rise, form the dough into balls, a size slightly smaller than a baseball. As you round the dough, pull from the top and turn it under and pinch the seams to form a nice rounded shape.

Lay the balls of dough 2" apart, placed between two bedding sheets, and a sheet of plastic on top. (You can cut a plastic table cloth from a fabric store or hardware store. Or use a vinyl tablecloth for insulation.)

Let the balls of dough rise again for ½ hour to an hour until about double in size.

Then, with a rolling pin and using light pressure, roll each ball on a bread board to ¼ inch thick.

Put the flattened dough back on the sheets and rest another ½-1 hr.

Place an oven rack near the top of the oven and preheat to 500 degrees.

10 minutes before baking, place a sturdy cookie sheet (light silver preferred to dark ones) on the oven rack to preheat the tray.

With great care to not disturb the dough, gently place the dough on the hot tray and put in oven to bake.

Watch carefully as the pocket bread rises. It will be done in 2-8 minutes. While wearing extra thick oven mitts, carefully check with a spatula that the bread pockets are a little brown on the bottom and golden on top.

Remove bread to a cooling rack.