Pita

• 1. Introduction

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  Pita is a round, yeast-raised wheat flatbread, and its most familiar form keeps a hollow space hidden inside. The bread belongs to a wide family that is common around the Mediterranean, across the Middle East and in the lands next to them. Slice one open and a pocket waits there, ready for a filling. But where did that name come from, and why do so many languages claim a version of it? How long have people been baking flatbreads like this? Was the pocket always part of the bread? And what happens when a baker's oven gives way to an industrial production line? The answers run from Stone Age Jordan to modern factory belts.

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• 2. Roots of a Word

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  The Oxford English Dictionary cites 1936 as the first appearance of the word in English. English took it from Modern Greek píta, which means bread, cake or pie. Byzantine Greek used the term as well, and a record of it survives from 1108. Past that point the trail splits.

  One theory points to Ancient Greek pítta or píssa, both meaning pitch or resin. Another points to piktḗ, a fermented pastry, which may have passed into Latin as picta. Pizza may be a relative of that line.

  A rival line of thought runs through Hebrew. Classical Hebrew had the word patt, literally a morsel of bread. Its spelling matches the Aramaic pittā, and Byzantine Greek may have received the word from there. Some hypotheses add Germanic or Illyrian go-betweens.

  A separate dispute concerns English itself. Some say English borrowed the word straight from Modern Hebrew, which had revived the Aramaic term in the preceding decades. Doubters note that native Modern Hebrew nouns carry their stress on the final syllable.

  Even the English pronunciation divides, with one form sounding like PIT-uh and a US form like PEE-tuh. British writers go further and spell it pitta.

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• 3. Bread by Other Names

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  In Egypt, ordinary bread is called eish baladi, or simply eish, which means bread. Egyptians also use other subtypes of bread, such as eish fino and eish merahrah.

  Arabic more broadly offers a handful of labels. Speakers say khubz, meaning bread, or al-khubz al-ʿarabiyy, meaning Arab bread. Another name is khabaz al-kimaj. The phrase khabaz albayta, literally pita bread, is heard sometimes too.

  English adds its own list of alternatives: Arabic bread, Arab bread, Syrian bread, Lebanese bread and pocket bread. The Western name pita can also stretch to cover flatbreads that carry different names locally, including numerous styles of Arab khubz.

  The word has traveled into neighboring languages as well. Turkish borrowed it as pide. Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian use pita, Romanian has pită, Albanian has pite, and Bulgarian has pitka or pita.

  Greek draws a line that English blurs. By default, pita there means the thicker, pocketless Greek bread. The thinner khubz-style loaf gets its own label, aravikí pita, which translates as Arabic pastry.

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• 4. Stone Age Flatbread

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  About 14,500 years ago, in what is now Jordan, the Natufian people made a kind of flatbread from wild cereal grains. That evidence places the ancestors of pita in the Stone Age.

  Around 10,000 years ago, in the Neolithic period, ancient wheat and barley were among the first crops people domesticated. The Fertile Crescent was the setting for that change.

  By 4,000 years ago, bread held a central place in societies such as the Babylonian culture of Mesopotamia. The earliest-known written records and recipes for bread-making come from there. Pita-like flatbreads, cooked in a tinûru, which is also spelled tannur or tandoor, were a basic part of the diet. They resembled today's tandoor bread, taboon bread and laffa, an Iraqi flatbread with many similarities to pita.

  One ingredient is missing from this long record. No ancient text describes the steam-puffed, two-layer pocket pita, and neither does any medieval Arab cookbook. Food historians such as Charles Perry and Gil Marks think the pocket was probably a later development.

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• 5. Steam and Fire

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  Between 450 and 475 degrees Fahrenheit, the water locked inside a disc of pita dough turns to steam. The steam pushes the dough apart and the whole bread puffs up. Once it leaves the oven, it deflates, but the baked layers stay separate. That separation lets a cook open the bread into a pocket. Some pita is baked without any pocket at all and is called pocket-less pita.

  Tradition calls for serving it fresh, straight from a wood-fired oven much like a pizza oven. It is best soon after baking or on the same day, and it can be served warm.

  Modern commercial bakeries work on a different scale. Advanced automatic production lines draw flour from silos holding 100,000 pounds at a time and produce thousands of pitas per hour. The ovens run at 800-900 degrees Fahrenheit, far hotter than traditional clay ovens, so each pita bakes for only one minute.

  The breads then spend about 20 minutes cooling in the air on conveyor belts. After that they either ship immediately or go into commercial freezers held at 10 degrees Fahrenheit.

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• 6. Scoop, Wrap, Fill

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  Hummus is one of the dips that a piece of pita can scoop up. The same bread can also wrap kebabs, gyros, Sabich or falafel, in the manner of a sandwich. Cut into pieces and baked, it turns into crispy pita chips.

  In the United Kingdom, the term is used for the pocket versions. The Greek pita is one example, and it serves as a souvlaki wrap at barbecues.

  Druze pita takes a different route. It is filled with labneh, a thick yoghurt, and topped with olive oil and za'atar.

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• 7. Regional Tables

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  In Greece, the word pita means pastry, and it covers spanakopita, a spinach pie, and karydopita, a walnut cake. Neither has anything to do with the flatbread that English calls pita. Traditional Greek bread is leavened loaves, such as the round karvéli or the oblong frantzóla. The flatbread sense of pita is almost exclusively a wrap for souvlaki or gyros. It is usually garnished with some mix of tzatziki sauce, tomatoes, onions and french fries.

  In Cyprus, pita is typically rounder and fluffier, and it is baked on a cast-iron skillet. It holds souvlakia, sheftalia, halloumi with lountza, and gyros.

  Turkish cuisine uses pide for three styles. The first is a flatbread like the Greek and Arab kind, used to wrap various kebabs. The second is içli pide, where the filling sits on often boat-shaped dough before baking. Toppings include cheese, ground meat, other fresh or cured meats, and vegetables. The third is Ramazan pidesi. Regional differences in shape, baking technique and toppings give each region its own styles.

  In Bosnia, Croatia, Bulgaria and Serbia, the local flatbread goes by lepinja, somun, purlenka or pitica. It is the most common bread beside barbecued food such as ćevapi, pljeskavica, kebapche and grilled sausages. The word pita itself means pie in those languages. It mostly names börek or sweet phyllo pastries, with baklava the one exception, since it is always called baklava.

  The bread also appears in the cuisine of the Aromanians.

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