Hi Emily! Thanks for sharing this story.
Ok- so this recipe is almost identical to the original recipe which was my Tata’s. The only real changes were starting with a bit more flour and adding the note about knowing the dough was done when it pulls away from the bowl.
Have you tried this one? I may have changed the instructions but the changes to the ingredients are super minimal. The old one started with 4.5 cups of flour and used less water, but I always ended up adjusting that as needed. YOu want the dough to pull away from the bottom of the bowl!
I’m sure my grandmother made this by hand but my Mom and I have always used a mixer. Let me know how I can further help troubleshoot.

Theres a middle eastern restaurant in my area with an actual taboon (the name of the restaurant is Taboon)… and they make the BEST PITA BREAD. I would routinely go in after work and buy a big bag of it to take home. There was a serious, high-strung older fellow that made the bread. He would handle that big, wooden paddle in and out of the mouth of that blazing hot oven with intensity. Sometimes, he would be crabby — muttering in Arabic. I always wondered what he was crabby about, worried he was sick of me coming in to buy big bags of bread (of course, I always ordered ahead of time!).

Maybe he was hot. Or tired. I have no idea.

Then, to my dismay, they closed that location down. So, I decided to give making pita bread at home a try. I did some searches online and settled on a recipe. It was surprisingly easy. Almost too easy. The bread that was coming out of my oven tasted identical to Taboon’s bread. I literally ate the whole recipe before they could cool off completely. Thinking it was a fluke, I tried again the next day — same result (though, I didn’t eat ALL of it the second day).

It was Spring at the time and pita bread is more of a cool weather activity if your oven is in the house. It wasn’t until about 2.5 years later I decided to make it again. I grabbed my haphazard stack of printed recipes to find the recipe I had used. I couldn’t find it but I remembered some very specific things about the recipe. They were so specific in fact I recalled thinking that first time, “I can definitely find this again online if I lose this piece of paper”.

Oh, the lies I tell myself.

The instructions said something like make a “well” in the flour, kneading was by hand, “500 degree” oven, “lowest rack”, “inverted baking sheet if you don’t have a baking stone” — and I was so sure, “Tata” and a bit about her story. Knowing such details I was pretty confident I would easily be able find the recipe again.

I was so wrong.

I embarked on a (rather nutty) journey to find that recipe or reproduce it.

I tore my house and office apart (several times) looking for the paper recipe. A couple of years ago I dedicated an entire afternoon to reading EVERY PITA BREAD recipe on Google. I made a system where I tried using different ingredients and longer rises. Honey vs sugar, sea salt vs kosher vs table salt, APF vs bread flour vs mixing different flours, regular yeast vs professional grade yeast. I tried adding powdered milk, yogurt. I had a little stack of yellow sticky notes with ingredients and measurements written on them. I would try one recipe and go to the next one. If the recipe was good, I put a star on the sticky note. I stuck the sticky notes into a notebook with the date and any pertinent notes next to it (positive or negative).

I still occasionally find a yellow sticky note in a drawer or something.

I did get close a couple of times. Some of the recipes were really good but they weren’t what I wanted. Eventually, the weather changed and I abandon the baking until the weather cools off again.

In the meantime, I researched how yeast works, how salt can mess with it, how over-proofing can mess with the yeasty flavor. I read articles about restaurants, I did a lot of digging about yeasty flavored pizza dough – at one point I had several marked bowls of modified pizza dough rising in the fridge thinking maybe a 1, 2 or 3 day slow, chilly, rise would get me where I wanted to be.

To date, I’ve tried at LEAST 20 different (half / quarter) recipes and a staggering amount of variations of those recipes. It wasn’t unusual for me to do 3 or 4 recipes in one day.

One recipe was very close (I think it had “Hilda” in the name?) I thought maybe it was the one I was looking for all along — but I wasn’t completely convinced. How could my memory be so wrong? Had I just injected the Tata story into a different recipe? Did I blend one recipe into another? Did I use the instructions from one recipe and the measurements and ingredients from another?

I have the Hilda sticky note on my refrigerator because it was hands down the closest I’ve come to that first recipe. On some level, I started to force myself to accept Hilda’s recipe as the go to — but it not quite right. I don’t know what’s wrong with it and my head spins when I think about what tweaks to try.

It eventually dawned on me that the first recipe I used years ago, the one I was so sure was “Tata’s”, may have been edited. I navigated to this page and carefully read everything. At the end, I saw the note that it had been edited (maybe more than once). I wasn’t sure if I would ever find the original but at least I felt like I hadn’t imagined the whole thing. I WAS able to find an older version of Tata’s — but it wasn’t the original.

I know some people think “tender” is an upgrade when it comes to bread. I disagree. I like chewy bread. I went on a similar recipe quest for a dry, flavorful, chewy tortilla recipe that would crack if I bent it — that’s what I wanted, but those qualities are considered negative so I never found one.

I believe (I can’t “know” it because I can’t prove it) that Tata’s original, old-school pita bread recipe was the recipe I started with. It was perfect. And I had it in my possession. And I lost it. And every year when the weather begins to cool off I think of Tata’s hands expertly making dough without measuring anything. I can see it in my head like a movie. I can smell it. I can taste it. I can see the piece of paper I printed that had gotten wet. I can remember so clearly not being alarmed about the paper being destroyed by water because I was positive I would be able to find it again.

This is not meant to downplay the improvements your mother made. If a tasty, soft, tender pita that always poofs up is the gold-standard, this is a great recipe for that. But, if someone wants a flavorful, old-school, chewy pita that may or may not poof (I couldn’t care less about the poof) and eating it requires a robust amount of saliva generation to swallow the bread, our hands are empty and sad.

My hands.

My hands are empty and sad.

I’m debating if I should make my first pita recipe this Winter. I’m grinding my teeth and fretting internally about that lost piece of paper. I’m debating if I should tear the house up (again) to find it. Wondering where I haven’t looked yet (I have looked everywhere). Searching Google (again) to find that one recipe — even though I know it’s gone. Searching for a new recipe I haven’t seen yet.

Searching for the 100th + time is what brought me here today.

I can’t let it go.

Please post the earlier version(s).

Please.

Hi! Which recipe do you mean? The one I had originally shared? My Mom who makes it regularly said this new version was much better and more reliable, but I will see if I have the old version somewhere too.

If you have the original recipe, I’ve been looking for it – for like 5 years.

In the UK where pretty much everything Middle Eastern is known as Lebanese, none of the Lebanese restaurants even know this bread. They all use a much thinner bread that has a more elastic consistency.The Syrians too. Fine for wraps but not as nice for dipping. The Egyptians have something similar called Khobez baladi but that too is not as fluffy and tastes a bit different. Iraqis have something called Samoon bread. Only places that do it are the Israeli Falafel shops and the odd Palestinian restaurants (very few). Makes me conclude that is should probably be called Palestinian Pita bread.

Thanks so much!