This Pita pocket bread recipe is soft & pillowy. Achieve those characteristic pockets to hold your sammies like a cozy sleeping bag. Smells heavenly as it’s cooking. It is the perfect vehicle for chicken souvlaki or any Mediterranean dish.
Pita pocket bread is also great with dips, especially hummus or tzatziki. And is the perfect accompaniment to olives platters.
I used a variation of Chef Billy Parisi’s Pita bread recipe. I cut the recipe in half as well for a small batch recipe. We don’t need 14 pita pockets lying around for two people. Wasteful.
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What makes pita pocket bread puff?
To achieve those characteristic pockets you’ll need water and heat. The dough needs sufficient water for that to happen. You don’t want to work with a dry dough. You want it a bit tacky. Heat from an oven or hot griddle/pan will form steam and the middle and cause it to rise as it’s cooking.
It’s best to always do a test pita. If it’s not puffing up like you’d like spritz the top of your rolled out dough with a bit of water before cooking or baking it.
Alternatively, you can put a tray of water in the bottom of your oven if using this method. I recommend using a baking stone when baking your pockets, which you can also throw an upside down dutch oven pot over your bread as it’s baking on the stone to create natural steam that’s contained.
Handling your dough less and delicately helps to not deflate any air pockets in your dough formed by the gases of the yeast and microbes. Which helps with making your pita fluffy and pillowy.
One last recommendation is to make sure you let your dough rest a good 20 minutes to half an hour after rolling it. This allows the dough to relax and begin to rise again forming those CO2 gases which will also help to make your pita pockets puff.
What is the best way to cook Pita Pocket Bread:
- You can bake pita bread in the oven. We already discussed ways of baking it up in the oven above. Another advantage to baking it up in the oven is you can obviously bake all or most of your bread at once on a tray or baking stone. Recommended temperature for baking is 475° F. Make sure to also preheat your oven & stone at least a half an hour before baking.
- Cooking your pita pockets on a hot griddle or cast iron skillet it also a great method and the one I used for my instructional video below. You need to make sure your pan is good and hot before throwing your pita on. Cast iron is the perfect vehicle for this because it heats up evenly and maintains its temperature. Which ever method you use is purely up to you and based on personal preface and available resources.
I used a stand mixer to mix & knead my dough but you can mix and knead by hand.
Pita Pocket Bread Recipe: Soft & Pillowy
Ingredients
- 3/4 cup warm water (110° to 115° F)
- 1/2 packet of active dry yeast ( 1 + 1/8 teaspoon)
- 1 tablespoon of honey (or sugar)
- 1 & 1/2 cups bread flour (can also use all purpose flour)
- 6 Tablespoons whole wheat flour
- 1 teaspoon sea salt
- 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil plus more for covering dough
Instructions
- Activate yeast by adding yeast, honey, & water (110-115° F) to a stand mixer. Give it a quick stir and let activate for 5 minutes or until bubbly on top.
- To a large bowl add bread flour, whole wheat flour, & sea salt and give it a whisk.
- When the yeast has activated add 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil. Pour in about half of the flour mixture. Assemble hook attachment and turn on low speed.
- Gradually keep adding flour in increments until the dough begins to pull away from the sides of the bowl. You may not need all of the flour.
- Continue to knead the dough for 7-10 minutes until smooth and slightly sticky.
- Remove from the mixer and transfer to a well oiled bowl & a light coat over the dough to keep from sticking. Cover & place in a warm environment and rise for 2 hours or until doubles in size.
- When doubled in size, punch dough down, remove from bowl.
- Lightly flour surface and gently press dough into a rectangular shape. Divide the dough into roughly equal portions with a bench scraper.
- Fold each dough ball under several times until a smooth dough ball is formed.
- Cover dough balls and roll out each dough ball out on a lightly floured surface into an oval shape 6-8 inches in diameter and about 1/8″ thick.
- Cover & rest another 30 minutes.
- Preheat a large cast iron skillet on medium heat. Cook individually 1 to 1 1/2 minutes per side or until golden brown & puffy. Flip and repeat process.
If you like this recipe you may like this homemade tortillas using a tortilla press recipe.
I hope you try this recipe and enjoy it as much as I did. I used this pita pocket bread for some left over chicken souvlaki and it was so delicious. Like getting greek street food right in your own kitchen.
I’m hoping to share my chicken souvlaki recipe with you very soon. So stay tuned for that and more recipes and videos.
I’m planning on doing more lifestyle blogs and articles as well. If any of you are into pottery or ceramics stick around. I’ll be diving into that hobby and making some video tutorials for hand built and wheel thrown pottery!
See you back here soon.
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This recipe says, ” Divide the dough into roughly equal portions with a bench scraper.” But it doesn’t say how many equal parts. 2? 100? Due to this omission, the recipe’s a failure. But all is not lost. You can go back and fix it.
Man, what a negative grump you are. A real assh*le if I might add. I literally made a video to go along with the recipe. It says roughly equal portions which means you divide in half and keep dividing those sections in half. If you can’t understand that, I can’t help you.