How to make homemade pita bread

Are you planning to prepare a green Middle Eastern-style aperitif or an eco-sustainable and healthy ethnic dinner to amaze your friends? Well, we have the recipe for you! Homemade pita bread, or more simply the bread very common in the Middle East, but also in Greece and Turkey, to be cut and stuffed or served with vegetables, potatoes, meat or fish.

Do you have in mind to prepare a green aperitif Middle Eastern style or a eco-sustainable ethnic dinner and healthy to amaze your friends? Well, we have the recipe for you! There homemade pita, or more simply the widespread bread in the Middle East, ma anche in Greece e Turkey, to be cut and stuffed or served with vegetables, potatoes, meat or fish.

On the market there are various types: more or less soft and with different thickness, but all (at least those commonly found in supermarkets) have in common the presence of chemical additives, which slow down the degeneration process.

For this, we propose one quick and easy recipe to make a perfect and natural pita.

The trick is in form a paste made of water and flour that you find the right balance between the two ingredients: if you add too much water the pita will be difficult to handle, because it will become slippery; adding too much flour will become too hard a ball, even when cooked.

Index

So here are the ingredients to make a perfect pita

Ingredients

• 1 kg of sifted flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon of sugar
• 1 tablespoon of olive oil
• 1/2 teaspoon of baking powder
• 2 cups of warm water

• Preparation Time:
  15 minutes
• Cooking time:
  5 minutes
• Rest time:
  2 hours of leavening
• Dose:
  4 people to
• difficulty:
  medium

Homemade pita bread: procedure

• Pour the flour into a large bowl, add the salt, sugar and baking powder, mix to distribute the ingredients evenly; then add the olive oil, mix well with a wooden spoon and pour in the two cups of warm water.
• Stir again, with your wooden spoon, until you get a very soft dough, which will be more sticky and elastic than what you get during the preparation of bread or of pizza.

• Let it rest for a few minutes and when you see bubbles on the surface of the dough, re-mix it for a few minutes, then cover it with a cloth and let it rise for about 2 hours.
• At this point - with the help of a little flour to make the dough less sticky - divide the dough into 20 balls and knead them one at a time: roll out the dough on a floured work surface and make a pizza with a diameter of at least 20 cm .
• Then heat a pan that has more or less the same diameter (the ideal would be to use pans made specifically for cooking pita that have a thick lid with a resistance inside, so as to cook the bread evenly) .

• When the bottom of the pan is hot, place the pita in it and cover with the lid, wait for a little smoke to come out, then turn it over and cook the other side as well; the pita will be ready when the other side starts to burn.

Repeat the same operation for all the dough balls and then stuff them as you like!

Verdiana Amorosi

Process images: Greenprophet