Sourdough pita bread recipe | Super easy, the best recipe

You are pondering what to make for dinner. You love middle eastern food, but your partner is into food from Greece. One kid loves pizza, but the other one will basically only eat hotdogs. What are you supposed to do? Well, pita bread to the rescue. Here is my recipe for sourdough pita bread.

Pita bread is awesome. Soft, delicious hot bread with a built-in pocket that can be filled with anything your heart desires (I mean food!!). Best of all, they are really not hard to make.

Supermarket pita bread is normally made in a factory. A success criterion for factories is to push out as much of what they make in the least amount of time, but that is seldom good when we talk about food.

Especially bread needs to be left alone to develop taste and also to break down gluten. One reason there are so many gluten-insensitive people is that the factory-made bread never gets enough time to break down the gluten.

This recipe that I am providing here gets to do both of those things, which gives you a wonderful bread full of taste, that won’t fill you like a ton of bricks.

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The history of pita bread

Pita bread has a long history, which starts in the Middle East over 14,000 years ago, in the Stone Age.

The dough would be made using very rough milled grains and would stand around and attract free-floating yeast, much as sourdough was used later on.

With the invention of Brewer’s Yeast that started to become the go-to leavening.

Around 10,000 years ago people had domesticated ancient wheat grains and barley, so these grains were milled and used for these kinds of bread.

Around 4,500 pita bread was a staple and there are records of recipes. The bread was prepared in something akin to tandoor ovens.

Still, they were probably nothing like the kinds of pita bread that are prepared and eaten today.

In the Middle East, these pieces of bread are often still prepared in backyard stoves, but in most other regions of the world, these pieces of bread are made in factories.

I want to change that.

How do you get the pocket in this sourdough pita bread recipe?

So, you may wonder how the pocket is made in pita bread.

Do you somehow cut it in half and seal the bread up again? But wouldn’t they split open again? So many questions.

The answer is super simple. Steam. The pita bread is baked super hot. Crank your oven all the way up to 260°C/500°F.

As the bread is put onto a hot surface, all the water in the dough is quickly brought to boiling temperature, creating lots of steam which puffs the bread up in the middle.

This means a baking steel or baking stone is a great tool to get perfect pita bread. If you don’t have that you may want to prepare them on a heavy-duty cast-iron skillet on the stovetop.

When the bread then cools this gap doesn’t seal again, so when you cut it open there’s a convenient pocket in the middle.

The dough composition

Vitals

Total weight	871 grams
Pre-fermented flour	22.6%
Hydration	65%
Yield	8 pita bread

The dough

Flour selection

The dough is mainly made from bread flour, we need some strength to work against those crazy steam powers that blow up the bread.

I also like to put some whole grain in my pita bread dough, so 20% of the flour is whole grain wheat flour. You can basically substitute with any whole grain flour that you like, even gluten-free flours will work.

Hydration

The hydration of the dough is 65%, but this should be taken with a grain of salt, because after mixing the dough we knead it, and here it is important to add enough flour to have a nice supple tacky but not sticky dough.

You don’t want the dough to stick to everything making it impossible to move it to the oven.

Other extras

A bit of olive oil and sugar is added to the dough, which will both help soften the dough and let it stay moist for longer.

The salt content is 2.6% to really bring out the taste of the flour.

The formula

Weight	Ingredient	Baker's Percentage
308g	bread flour	80.0%
77g	whole grain wheat flour	20.0%
211g	water	54.8%
225g	starter (100% hydration)	58.4%
25g	olive oil	6.5%
15g	sugar	3.9%
10g	salt	2.6%

If you want to play around with the formula, and change hydration or quantity, you can do so in my Bread Calculator.

The conclusion of this sourdough pita bread recipe

These pita bread are absolutely a delight and it requires so little work to make them.

They are soft and fluffy. They have a wonderful fermented taste with lots of nutty notes from whole grain wheat flour.

The pocket is super well defined making it easy to cut the pita open and fill it with all the goodies in the world.

They can be eaten straight out of the oven. They can stay good in a sealed plastic bag on your counter and be reheated or you can put them in the freezer for 3 months, thaw them in the fridge, and be reheated in the oven.

Why are you sitting there reading? Go make delicious pita bread.

Ideas for fillings for sourdough pita bread

Here are my four ideas for fillings that

Middle Eastern-inspired pita bread

To your warm pita add:

• 3 fried crushed falafels
• Thinly sliced halved cucumbers
• Halved cherry tomatoes
• Thinly slice red onions
• Drizzle over some tahini.
• Top with some finely chopped mint leaves

Greek-inspired pita bread

To your warm pita add:

• Thinly sliced halved cucumbers
• Halved cherry tomatoes
• Thinly slice red onions
• Some delicious cubed feta
• Drizzle over some greek salad dressing made by whisking:
  • 1 tbsp red wine vinegar
  • 1 tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice
  • ½ clove garlic, minced
  • ¼ tsp dried oregano
  • ¼ tbsp kosher salt
  • A dash of freshly ground black pepper
  • ¼ cup or 60 ml olive oil
• Top with finely chopped oregano

Italian inspired pita bread

Heat your oven to 220°C/425°F.

Put a pita on a peel and spread some passata on it. Top with some sliced buffalo mozzarella.

Then put some fresh leaves of basil on top. Heat in the oven for 7-8 minutes until the pita is crispy.

Add a fresh leaf of basil. Slice and serve.

Danish-inspired pita bread

To your warm pita add:

• Sliced boiled red hotdogs (or another kind if you can’t get red)
• Top with ketchup
• Strong mustard
• Sweet mustard
• Remoulade
• Diced raw onions
• Fried onions
• And pickled cucumbers (also known as cucumber salad):
  • 1 cup/240 ml vinegar
  • 1 cup/240 ml sugar
  • Mix to combine.
  • Slice an English cucumber very thinly and add to the mixture.
  • Leave to infuse at least 1 hour, but it’s better with 24 hours.

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