Pita

Although I already learned how to make Challah, I decided it was high time to add another carby food to add to my arsenal. Enter one of the simplest forms of bread; the Pita.

This is a very easy recipe to make, but it does take more than three hours to make properly. I found the recipe here.

Since it is baking, I figured I'd stick pretty close to the recipe.

1 package of yeast (2.33 tsp)
1/2 cup of warm water
1 tsp of white sugar

3 cups of flour
1 1/4 tsp of salt
1 cup of lukewarm water

vegetable oil
flour

Start by adding the sugar and yeast to 1/2 cup of warm water.
Let it sit for about 10 minutes or until the mixture is foamy.

Add the salt to your flour in a medium sized bowl and mix it together.
Then slowly add the yeast and 1 cup of lukewarm water to the flour/salt and stir with a wooden spoon.
Knead until the the mixture is not sticky anymore. This should take about 10 minutes.
Coat the edges of a large mixing bowl with vegetable oil and flip the dough over in the bowl so the entire dough ball has been "kissed" by the oil.
Set the dough aside for about three hours. In this time it should double in size.

3 hours later you need to turn on your over to about 500 fahrenheit, make sure your baking pan is in the oven while you're doing this.
Take the dough and roll it out into a long rope.
Depending on the size pita you want, break the dough off into pieces and put on a floured surface.
Let them sit for 10 minutes
Roll the pieces out with a rolling pin. If you don't have one, yo can also knead the pieces into the size and shape you want.
This recipe, for me, made rather small sized pitot (Hebrew plural of pita), maybe 3 inches in diameter.

To bake them, put them on your baking sheet towards the bottom of the oven for 4 - 5 minutes.
After 5 minutes, flip them over for not more than another 2 - 3 minutes.
Just know that the longer they sit in the oven, the greater risk of burning. If you're shooting for the 7 - 8 minute range, watch them closely.

They will have bubbled up while baking. Take the pitot out and squash them down before they cool.

I took the opportunity to serve these pitot with some freshly made hummus from scratch. Feel free to check out the recipe I used for that on an earlier blog post.

This time the hummus was a little different because I used canned chickpeas and they were wetter than I anticipated. The mixture was a lot smoother, but the taste is still there.



On the whole, baking pita was a lot of work and I'm not quite sure how worth it they were to make. It was a great way to spend the second half of my shabbat though. I can't wait to play with the recipe a little bit more though add spices and what have you.

B'tayavon!