I've been packing lunch since September and since I'm trying to reduce my bread intake I often use pitas. It takes me a week to go through a package so they get hard by the end of the week unless I put them in the freezer (and they dry out there too). So I found this recipe that tells you how to make them, and tried it this week; they turned out very well and it was easy. You don't have to know anything about baking bread, and you don't need any fancy equipment, you can even put them right on the oven rack on some aluminum foil --- don't worry about the baking stone they have in the pictures. You can use a glass bottle to roll them if you don't have a rolling pin.
Recipe and instructions for pita breads, with pictures.
The best part is you can keep the dough balls in the fridge for a week (or 10 days so far in my case) and bake them as you need them so they are fresh.
I made them with the ingredients listed below and divided them into 10 rounds (instead of 8 like the recipe says). I put these ingredients into the Sparkpeople recipe calculator and got this result for each whole pita (I cut them in half so I only use 70 cal) :
Calories 141.7
Total Fat 1.9 g; Saturated Fat 0.3 g; Cholesterol 0.0 mg; Sodium 465.7 mg; Potassium 23.6 mg; Total Carbohydrate 27.6 g; Dietary Fiber 2.7 g; Sugars 0.1 g; Protein 4.4 g
Ingredients used:
2 tsp yeast
1 c warm water
1 1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1 1/2 cup white flour
2 tsp salt
1 Tbsp olive oil
If you scroll down on this page you can find tips for making them from all sorts of flours:
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/recipes/pitabread
If you have kids and an oven with a window these are really fun because you can see them puff up. Kneading is also a good upper body workout!
A tip: the recipe says try not to use all the flour, but mine turned out much better when I used closer to the 3 cups than 2 1/2 cups. The lower amount of flour made them too wet and they baked into crackers, not soft and fluffy.
Bake your own pita pockets
