Sesame Pita Bread

Pita bread, as it is know in Southern Africa, is a flat wheat bread of Mediterranean origin with a pocket into which one can put various delicious fillings. It's very tasty! Pita can also be healthy as one can substitute the flour for whole wheat flour!


Upon seeing the price of pita bread in the shops, I suddenly decided it might be cheaper to make my own. I thought it should be fairly easy since there are so few ingredients.. I found a great recipe at www.thefreshloaf.com. For me, a great recipe is one that's quite easy to follow and apply. The recipe helpfully explains why each of the ingredients is important and how they work together.

The amount of preparation is huge (a LOT of waiting and waiting), but results are pleasing and well worth it. This was my first time making any sort of bread and it came out well even though I deviated from the recipe a bit.
To make it extra tasty and extra browned, I thought sesame seed oil would be a good substitute for normal/olive oil and treacle (sugar) for normal sugar. I think these ingredients where a bit heavy because some of my breads where just flat (with no pockets). But they were GOLDEN and slightly sweet. They also had that lovely extra Mediterranean taste...HMMMM!

I say that because tahini, one of the main ingredients for humus, is a sesame seed paste (which I also tried to make but didn't quite succeed). And they're always putting sesame seeds into Mediterranean salads and so on. Anyway, although my pita's were a bit heavy, they tasted fine!

Another reason why some of my breads might've come out flat is because I might've made them too thin before I put them in the oven. The thicker ones seemed to rise easier. So, I'd say er on the side of thickness.


AND... washing up is so easy! I used one bowl for mixing and a large cutting board on which I rolled, kneaded and let my delicious dough rise. The pan you turn upside-down and it hardly gets any dirt on it.