Freshly Baked Pita Can Happen in Your Very Own Oven
Kneading, rolling and baking the bread known as khobz in Arabic makes brilliant use of a day stuck inside
There’s nothing like pita bread straight from the oven to scoop up just-made hummus or baba ganoush, swish into a lentil soup, or to wrap around left-overs — drizzled with tahini and hot sauce and brightened with fresh herbs.
It’s not difficult to make pita — or khobz in Arabic — even if you’re not a seasoned baker. And it’s super fun. There’s an incredible reward at the end, when you look into the oven and see those bad boys magically puff up into bready balloons. You can actually watch them inflate!
It’s a lovely, soul-sustaining project to cheer up a day when you’re forced to stay at home. Fresh-baked pita freezes brilliantly, so you can save some for later — or zip some up in a plastic bag and freeze it for an at-risk friend or relative who can’t leave home for groceries.
During the pita baking process, there is a lot of resting and rising and waiting between steps — perfect moments for whipping up that hummus or baba ganoush, or chopping the vegetables for soup.
We are big consumers of pita at our house, largely thanks to my own personal baba ganoush and hummus addiction. The pitas are usually store-bought, and much to my family’s chagrin, I usually come home with the whole wheat ones — which honestly are usually more like chewing on particle board than eating bread. In any case, we really consider them vehicles for the dips.
Best is when I can make it up to a northern suburb, to my favorite Lebanese bakery where I buy the freshly made ones, still warm in their plastic bags. There I usually pick up both white ones and whole wheat. The white ones are gloriously puffy, fluffy and delightful. The whole wheat pitas, on the other hand, while undeniably better than their mass-produced brethren, are just a wee bit punitive.
Because pitas are so ubiquitous through the Levant, I kept imagining that they couldn’t be all that hard to make, and learning how was getting higher and higher on my bucket list. Mine could split the difference between white and whole wheat and go fifty-fifty. The pita of my dreams! Surely it was attainable.
A couple months ago, I took the pita plunge — reading everything reliable I could find and starting to play with recipes.
Many of the recipes that looked serious enough for me to want to try them required a stand mixer, which I don’t own. (I never wanted to develop recipes that require one because I don’t feel a stand mixer should be a required piece of kitchen equipment.) Very few of the promising recipes I found called for more than a token amount of whole wheat flour.
It seemed I’d have to develop my own. To do that I began swapping out whole wheat flour for half of the all-purpose flour in a couple of different recipes, sometimes adding extra water to compensate. Claudia Roden’s method in The New Book of Middle Eastern Food almost got me there, but the dough didn’t rise quite as much as I wanted it to.
Finally, I turned to Anissa Helou’s award-winning Feast: Food of the Islamic World, hopeful about Helou’s method because she has written such wonderful baking books (I love Sweet Middle East and have Savory Baking from the Mediterranean on my wish-list). Also, because pita bread is literally the very first recipe in Helou’s 500-plus-page tome, I knew she must take her khobz very, very seriously.
Helou’s recipe calls for instant (fast-acting) yeast, and I wanted to use active dry yeast. (This may be a TMI situation, but active dry yeast keeps for a long time, and I wanted to develop a recipe that could be made without dashing to the supermarket; if you keep active dry yeast, flour, olive oil and salt on hand — which is so easy to do — you’ve got the makings for pita.) So I had to veer from her first few steps, and also had to find the right flour to water ratio.
But I was able to keep the heart of Helou’s method, the part that gets us from shaggy ball of dough to rolled-out discs ready to go into the oven. From Michael Solomonov and Steven Cook’s book Zahav, I borrowed the excellent idea of baking the breads on inverted baking sheets preheated in the very hot oven.
None of the recipes I consulted warned of what can happen if you let the baked pita breads cool completely before storing leftover breads: They can get stiff and crackly, not what you want. I added Roden’s suggestion to put them in a plastic bag as they come out of the oven, keeping them soft and pliable.
I hope you dive in and give this pita project a go; the process of kneading and rolling and waiting for the dough to rise is so wonderfully tactile, giving such a lovely rhythm to a day spent at home.
And the first payoff — that gasp of delight when you peer inside the oven and see the pita breads poofing up like balloons — is so much fun. The second payoff? That’s when you pull the first one apart and taste it — and marvel that it actually came out of your very own oven. Quick — get the baba ganoush!
Pita Bread Recipe
Makes 12 loaves. Besides a rolling pin, you will also need several clean kitchen towels or tea towels. Have a plastic zipper bag ready; they the pitas come out of the oven, drop them in and zip it up, so they stay soft and pliable; otherwise, they get stiff pretty quickly. Freshly-baked pitas freeze well. Let them thaw in their plastic bag, then warm them briefly in a 350 degree oven.
Ingredients
- 1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon active dry yeast
- 1/2 teaspoon sugar
- 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour (plus additional for dusting)
- 2 cups whole wheat flour
- 2 teaspoons sea salt
- 1/4 cup olive oil (plus additional for oiling a bowl)
Instructions
1. Proof the yeast to make sure it’s still active: Pour 1/2 cup of warm (not hot) water into a small bowl, add the yeast and stir to dissolve. Then stir in the sugar. Now wait and watch: When it begins to froth (about 10 minutes), that means the yeast is still active and good. Stir in another 1 cup of warm water and set aside.
2. In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the all-purpose and whole wheat flour with the salt to combine. Make a depression in the center of the flour mixture, pour in the 1/4 cup olive oil, and use your fingers to work the oil into the flour.
3. Now you’re going to gradually add the yeast liquid. Pour a little into the center, and use your fingers again to pull the flour mixture into it. Continue until the liquid is all incorporated, then knead the the mixture inside the bowl until it’s a sticky, shaggy ball of dough.
4. Lightly flour your work area (whether it’s a very large cutting board, a granite counter or marble slab). Turn the dough onto the surface and knead it for three minutes. Shape the dough into a ball, invert the mixing bowl over it and let it rest covered like that for 15 minutes.
5. Knead the dough for three more minutes, or until it is smooth and elastic. Wash and dry the mixing bowl and coat the inside with a little olive oil. Shape the dough into a ball, put it in the bowl and roll it around to coat with the oil. Cover the bowl loosely with plastic film, and set it somewhere warm and free of drafts to rise. (When my kitchen is chilly, I sometimes turn the oven on for a couple of minutes, then turn it off, leave the door slightly ajar and let the dough rise next to it.) Leave it there for an hour, until it roughly doubles in size.
6. Turn the dough back onto your work surface, and use a bench scraper or knife to divide it into twelve equal pieces. Roll each piece into a ball. Arrange them, with a little space in between each, in a square or rectangle, and cover them with a very damp kitchen towel and leave them to rest for 45 minutes.
7. Lightly flour your work surface, and use a lightly floured rolling pin to roll each ball into an even, flat 6-to-7-inch round. Roll them as round and evenly thick as you can, so they puff fully as they bake. Arrange them close to each other, sprinkle with a little flour, and lay a clean, dry tea towel (you may need two) over them. Let them rest 15 to 20 minutes.
8. While the rounds are resting, place inverted baking sheets on two racks in the oven, and heat the oven to 500 degrees F.
9. Now it’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for! Because the pitas will bake very quickly, you might want to try a single one first, to see how it goes. Place one of the rounds on a baking sheet and bake till it’s puffed out and very lightly golden, which might be anywhere from 5 to 7 minutes. Start checking at around 4 minutes. You won’t need to flip it over. Use a spatula to remove it to a wire rack and let it cool just slight before either devouring it or sealing it in the zipper bag. Bake the rest in several batches, two or three at a time on each of the two baking sheets.
