I ran across a recipe online for Greek chicken and decided this past weekend to go all out with dinner. So I made my own hummus, grilled potato salad, feta tzatziki sauce, Greek chicken and then thought it would be fun to make my own pita bread too. I knew it could be a little tricky but figured as long as it was edible it would be fine. Since this was a new endeavor I decided to use King Arthur’s recipe and was surprised to see it wasn’t quite as time intensive as I had imagined.

Like many bread recipes, you mainly just mix all of the ingredients together and them knead them (or let the stand mixture do the work!). Once the 5 minutes was up I let the dough rest and it actually ended up resting a little over an hour since I got busy making the hummus.

I divided the dough and then began rolling the dough out. I ended up with three on a large baking pan and then popped them into the 500 degree oven. They don’t bake long; 5 minutes on the bottom rack and then 2 minutes on the top rack. My first round were a little harder than I would have liked and didn’t puff up at all. I think I left them in there a little longer on the bottom than I was supposed to, hence the slightly crispier texture. I decided these would be perfect for the hummus and started on round two but since they didn’t puff up I decided to bump up the oven temperature to 515 degrees. I was able to get two of the three from this batch to puff up, which was exciting! My last two didn’t puff up either but weren’t quite as hard as round one.

I was a little disappointed I only got two of the eight to actually puff up like pita, but they tasted great so it wasn’t a huge loss. I think it’ll take a little more testing to consistently get puffy pita’s, but I would definitely make these again and they were perfect with our Mediterranean inspired dinner and the hummus.

Recipe Used: King Arthur