Pitas

After our lettuce pitas the night before, I decided to make some actual pitas for lunch, so we could put our leftovers from last night into fresh pitas. I followed this recipe, and it worked beautifully. Didn't take too long, either, which was nice.


Pitas
3C flour
1.5tsp salt
1 tbs sugar
1 tbs yeast
1 1/3C warm water
2 tbs olive oil

Put the warm water in a bowl, add your yeast and sugar, and let it sit for five minutes or so to proof the yeast. Then dump in everything else, stir it until its mixed, and dump that lot onto a floured table or some other surface for kneading. Flour your hands, and knead the dough for 5-10 minutes continuously. I set a kitchen timer for that sort of thing. When you're done, the dough should feel wonderfully elastic and stretchy, and smooth.

Grease a bowl, and let the dough rise somewhere warm (mine went near a radiator) for an hour. The original recipe called for longer, but I was hungry. The dough should have doubled in bulk by then, if not, let it keep rising for a while. Once it's doubled in bulk, dump it back onto that floured surface, and cut it into 8 pieces with a knife. Roll each piece into a round ball, and let those sit while you pre-heat the oven to 400F.


Once the oven is warm, roll out the first ball into a flat pizza shape. Don't roll it too thin, just pretty thin. Put one to two pitas on a baking sheet at a time, and bake for 5-8 minutes, until they're really poofed up.
You don't want them to get too brown, because then they'll be crispy instead of soft and pliable.

Let them cool for a little bit, and then cut them in half and proceed to stuff them with things. Here we have leftovers from the lettuce pitas from last night. Quite tasty. Although according to Ed, I overstuff my pitas.


Ed's version of a pita. Not nearly enough stuff inside.