We were going to do Greek. Grilled chicken gyros, to be precise. Heidi had the chicken marinating, we made the tsatsiki sauce with yogurt we made from scratch, I bought a perfect tomato (because Bennett is still a tomato assassin), yet we hadn’t purchased or made any bread suitable to the task for gyros.

Yes, in the past we had made the phoenician bread for the purpose, but we didn’t do that this time. We were toying with the idea of using tortillas, but rather than cause a cultural paradox that resulted in the implosion of the universe, I decided to find a suitable recipe for the creation of pita bread. How hard could it all be? Turns out, not very.

I found a number of recipes when I did the google, but the one that jumped out at me was written by a lady out in Missouri.

Without further ado, here’s the skinny:

Farmgirl’s Pita Bread After Bernard Clayton
Makes 8

2-1/2 cups bread flour (regular AP flour worked fine for me), plus more for sprinkling while kneading & rolling out dough
2 teaspoons salt
1 Tablespoon sugar
2 teaspoons active dry yeast
2 Tablespoons good olive oil
1 cup warm water (105-110 degrees)

8 8-inch squares of aluminum foil for baking pitas

Foodiefarmgirl’s post is very thorough, but she’s a professional baker whereas I’m a schmuck who likes to cook. Read her post: it’s quite informative. Anyway, here’s my process and some observations.

In a large bowl, combine 1 cup flour with the salt, sugar, and yeast. Add the oil and water. Beat well for a few minutes until the consistency is smooth and the top is a little frothy, then stir in the rest of the flour 1/2 cup at a time. When the dough comes together it’ll be a little sticky. This will be taken care of in the kneading.

Flour a surface, flour your hands, and start kneading. Set a timer for six minutes. As the dough gets tacky again, dust your surface and your hands and keep going. When you’re done, your dough will be exquisitely soft an pliable. Cut your dough into eight equal portions (pie-style). Roll those eight pieces into balls, arrange on a clean surface (I used our flexible cutting board), cover with a damp tea towel, and wait for 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 500°. No, really. 500° F. And put the rack on the lowest level of your oven. Of course, you’ll want to move the rack before your oven is preheated.

Flatten the balls out with your hand, then roll out to about 3/16th of an inch thick and 6 inches round. It was pointed out by foodie farm girl, that, while you’re getting out your gimmie ruler you got at the local fire station open house, use its thickness as a gauge, not the gradation on the ruler itself. Don’t worry about the roundness. It’ll all work out.

Place your extremely flat pita rounds on the sections of aluminum foil. (Though the next time I try this, I’m going to dust the foil a little with flour first — the pitas threated to stick when removed from the oven.) Then take the unbaked pitas and put them with the foil gently, directly on the bottom rack of your scorching hot 500° oven by threes or fours. In my oven they took five minutes.

Now while you’re waiting for those five minutes to elapse, let’s talk about what’s happening here. Dough in the oven has moisture and air pockets. Those little yeast are eating voraciously eating sugar, creating alcohol and belching out carbon dioxide. The alcohol cooks off, and the burps raise the roof. In normal bread, you let those little yeast burps raise the bread, you punch it down a few times to build strength, and when all is said and done, you load the dough up in the oven to slowly cook some of the moisture out while maintaining the lattice structure of gluten and tiny yeast burps.

Pita bread is really nothing like that. The rising phase is to build a little strength in the outside of the dough. The pocket comes from the heat. The little aluminum foil squares get the bread as close to the heat as you can get without scorching the whole mess, and the shock of the heat turns the dough’s moisture to steam while the skin starts baking almost instantly, rather like pâte à choux — but that’s a discussion for another day. Any slower, and the pitas would be flatbread rolls, but as they are, they puff beautifully. The kids and I turned on the oven light and crowded around our favorite cooking show just to watch them puff.

At five minutes — time varies due to variances in ovens, of course — they’ll start to brown nicely, take them out before they scorch, gently remove them from their foil and wrap them gently to let them rest for several minutes before you try to cut them open. Steam burns, you know. Wrapping them keeps the tops from drying out into crackers while you prep the rest of your greek dinner.

Even if they don’t puff perfectly — we had three duds in a batch of eight — they’re still perfectly tasty for just about any purpose you care to use bread for. The kids enjoy them plain or with PB&Honey. At about an hour start to finish, we’ll be making these again. Though next time, we’ll be using our wheat flour for extra flavor.

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