Pita For Jesus
The Recipe

This recipe is based on one I've been using from Deborah Madison's cook book "Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone" which is a book I can recommend that everyone have a copy of. It's that good. This is an easy recipe for anyone to make, even if you're not experienced making other breads. If you have a baking stone, put it in the oven right now, before you forget. A baking stone is the best way to bake pitas, though you can use a regular baking sheet if you haven't got one. The stone should heat up with your oven.

Ingredients:

2 1/4 tsp (1 envelope) active dry yeast
1 tsp honey
1 3/4 tsp salt
2 tbsp olive oil (plus extra for oiling the bowl for the dough)
1 1/2 cups multi-grain flour
2 cups bread flour (plus extra for kneading)

Put two cups of water in a large mixing bowl, stir in the yeast and honey, and set aside until foamy, about 10 minutes. Meanwhile oil a bowl for the dough.

If your yeast never gets foamy it's probably dead because you don't bake often enough and you should use some fresher yeast.

Stir in the salt and olive oil, then beat in the multi-grain flour until smooth. Add the remaining flour in small increments until the dough is too heavy to stir. Turn it onto a counter and knead it, adding more flour as needed, until the dough is supple and and smooth. Form it into a ball and put it in the oiled bowl, turning it to be sure the top is oiled. Cover with towel and set aside until doubled in bulk which should take about an hour.

Punch the dough down and divide it into 8 pieces if you want large pitas, or 16 pieces if you want smaller pitas. I like the smaller ones better because they are the perfect size for a mini pizza for one. Roll each piece into a ball and set them all aside covered by a damp towel or do as I do and just leave them lying around the counter until it's time to roll them out. At this point preheat the oven at 475 degrees. Let the dough rest while the oven preheats.

This is a great moment to relax and wonder how much wine Jesus drank a day when he wasn't wandering the desert with nothing but the sun to keep him company. You should, obviously, have a glass of your own wine while you thank your lucky stars you don't have to wander around the desert at all. Ever.

When the oven is ready I roll out as many pitas as I can fit on my baking stone, which is 4 if I'm making large ones, or 6 if I'm making the smaller ones. Place each one on the baking stone and let them cook for a bout 3 minutes each. Mine never completely puff up and I don't know the reason why. Generally speaking each one will at least partially puff up and the occasional one will completely puff up. I check the bottoms of the pitas to see if they're done- they should have only the slightest golden coloring on the bottom.

I roll out the next batch while I'm waiting for the current one to cook. If you happen to have an enormous kitchen you could roll them all out at once, but then you must not stack them on top of each other or they will stick together.

Let the hot pitas cool down on a cooling rack high enough up that my dog doesn't eat them.

Be sure to save one for Jesus.

I Wonder If Jesus Ate Pita Bread

I'll bet he did. And I'll bet he liked it too. Jesus was a Mediterranean guy, after all. One might even speculate that he was part Arab. How likely would it have been for him to be purely of European descent? Philip is telling me that the area in which Jesus lived was, by his lifetime, a real crossroads of cultures already. There were Mesopotamians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Phoenicians, Syrians, Egyptians, and Turks (for a start). Does it still bother some Christians to imagine that Jesus was probably not really white?

I like to imagine him as a blend of ethnicities. Though it would be deeply ironic if there was ever proof that he was of Northern African or Arab ethnicity. How that would make some millions of American and European Christians uncomfortable. Not that it's my life ambition to make anyone uncomfortable.

I like to think about what I brought back with me from my trip to Israel* to visit my father, his wonderful wife, and my half brother. I brought back with me, as souvenirs, a much sharper political understanding of the region, a deeper respect for the diversity of culture and the educational sophistication of that nation, some amazing cheesy Christian holy water and Jesus relic souvenirs which have sadly been lost in the fire, time spent with family which was both wonderful as well as raggedly emotional, and the best thing of all?

The experience of eating pita bread as it is eaten by the people who have been making it for a thousand years at least. It is not a pocket bread as Americans generally think of it. It's a flat bread that is used to scoop food up with. You tear it into pieces and use it to scoop up your meze dishes like Baba ghanoush or lebneh drizzled with olive oil, and maybe you use it to slop up some of the juices from your inevitable lamb dishes.

When you bring home new food ideas from trips abroad they stay with you a lot longer than trinkets do. I came home, found a recipe for home made pita from Deborah Madison's book, and I've been making it for the last twelve years. Every time I make it I think of Israel. I think of my father, his wonderful wife who is beautifully practical and yet also creative, and I think of my half brother who grew up knowing he had at least a brother and a sister but was raised alone. He's a full grown man now and I wish I could have grown up nearer to him so we could have gotten to know each other. Every time I make pita I feel like telling him that I have not smoked a cigarette in over four years now.

Every time I make pita bread I also think about the Arab restaurants where I had this exquisite flat bread and experienced the meze table for the first time. It makes me think of how textured and rich the Arab culture is. It makes me sad that my country is busy gunning it down right now. As though all Arabs were savages. Our government is restricting the seed saving rights of the Arab people we are currently occupying. The seeds we grow say a lot about the culture we nurture just as the bread we make and eat does. You take that kind of autonomy away from a people and you destroy who they are.

I make pita and remember that Arabs, like all other people on earth, have a lot in common with me on a cellular level. They have traditions that are meaningful to them; they have a rich history; they have an amazing culture which deserves to be respected by us all.

I feel confident that even if Jesus wasn't part Arab himself, he most likely ate lots of pita and no Wonderbread. I'm not really into Jesus from a religious perspective, but I'm fascinated by the stories about him and the times he lived in and endlessly riveted by the clash between who he apparently was and how so many Christians are so personally worried about me believing in him but then they ignore everything he supposedly stood for. It's like watching a silent film in which Jesus is doing all manner of peaceful things but the dialog stills are putting these words in his mouth:

"Ye Arabs are hoarding oil and God hates you for that so I am going to bomb your asses until you give it all to me!!!!"

I like to think that bringing pieces of culinary and cultural knowledge home with us from our travels helps us all connect with each other and helps to foster a greater respect for each other across the globe.