Pitas

/ jeffreyw

I just love to make little pizzas from pita bread rounds.  The best for the task that I’ve found so far are store bought “Lebanese pitas”-quotes because the bakery is in Chicago.  We are out of those particular pitas and that, and the need of grist for the blog mill, sent me to the Google for pita recipes.  I searched for Lebanese pita recipes and found a few.  I used the ingredient list from this post, and upon a further search I decided that the baking tips in this post were good enough to follow.

I used a bit more flour than the recipe called for because the batch seemed a bit wet and sticky in the bread machine dough cycle.  Your results will vary.  I let the dough rise twice in the machine and then dumped the dough onto a floured board and divided it into 8 portions.  These I molded into balls roughly baseball sized and covered again for a 20 minute rest.  I can never get the dough to roll out as thin as I would like but with some effort and additional rests the dough ended up barely OK.  I rolled the dough out right on the well floured peel so I didn’t have to handle it too much-it slid right off onto the stone will just a little shake.  While the bread was baking I was rolling the next one out.  I could see that I was getting better with just a little practice.

If you’ve seen one pita, you’ve seen them all.  Not so with pizza!

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5 thoughts on “Pitas”

  1. Wow, we gotta stop this mind meld thing. I have a pita recipe I’d been waiting to try and here you go and put together a whole slideshow on making pita bread. And then you went and made pizza out of them. Excellent work.

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  2. Well, Mrs J took off to go get her hair done and she said she was going to stop at the store afterwards. We were out of the pitas for the pizza thing we do but I knew that she wasn’t going to go out of her way to go to the next town over where the Asian grocery stocks the Lebanese style pita breads. I don’t know how they get them as thin as they do. My stab at them today was my first try. Maybe someone who is good at it will chime in with a tip to improve my technique.

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  3. Those look so good. I’ve yet to try to make my own pitas, mostly because when I make Greek food and get an urge to take a stab at them, I’m intimidated by the fact that I’d have to make about 30 of them to feed my crew. A homemade loaf of bread doesn’t last a day in my house, I always have to make at least 2 or they are gone by dinner time.
    BTW if you are looking for a way to overcome the dough being difficult to roll out and stay that way I’ve found a cheat I really love. King Arthur Flour Co. makes a dough enhancer that I use when I’m making pizza dough or dough for cinnamon rolls and I love it. I’m not usually big on added chemicals in food, it’s one of the reasons I started doing my own baking, I hate the chemical flavor in most store-bought sweets. But there are only 2 “chemically” sounding ingredients in this and it works so well that I made an exception for this. This is the link – http://www.kingarthurflour.com/shop/items/easy-roll-dough-improver-12-oz.
    Warning, this sight is addictive and I would be broke if I bought all the cool gadgets that I want and all of the baking goodies I would love to have. The recipe section is pretty impressive too, so much so that I went to Amazon and got used copies of a couple of their cookbooks.

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  4. IndyLib–Yay! I had no idea there was such a thing! I knew that “resting” was important and it helped me today to walk away from a half rolled pita for even just a few minutes. I ordered the stuff, and the odd gadget or two.

    I may never make a full sized pizza again.

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  5. I absolutely love the stuff, I used to get so frustrated rolling out dough for cinnamon rolls. The pizza dough flavor – http://www.kingarthurflour.com/shop/items/pizza-dough-flavor-4-oz is something else I have decided I must have in my cabinet . It makes the best freakin’ breadsticks ever. I stole a trick from our favorite local pizza place, I roll my pizza dough into a string, snip of pieces about 3-4 in. long and then deep-fry it. My kids would rather have it than the pizza.

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