The Secret Technique That Makes Egyptian Pita Perfect

There is nothing quite like freshly baked pita. The flavour, texture and shape make it the ultimate vehicle for delivering food to your mouth. You can stuff it like a pocket, wrap it full of your favourite foods, or scoop up every last bit of dip. And it's pretty much perfect, but it could be made even better. Imagine adding the tangy flavour of sourdough and the light, springy texture of focaccia. That, my friends, is the Egyptian masterpiece known as Aish Baladi. For over two years, it's been our mission to recreate it at home. We tried every recipe online, which all failed to deliver on flavour and texture. But then, failure after failure, Salma finally cracked it. Now, for the first time ever on YouTube, let me introduce you to your new favourite flatbread. Before I show you how to make it at home, let me take you behind the scenes to an old-school Cairo bakery, where I got first-hand insight into how it's made. While most bakeries these days rely on machines, the process here is still done by hand. In 40-degree heat, they pump out loaf after loaf of freshly baked Aish Baladi, and it starts with a dough that looks more liquid than solid. In a multi-stage process, it's portioned out and rested, flattened and rested, shaked and baked, then rested one more time. Every one of those steps is necessary to make good Aish Baladi, which is best described as a high-hydration pita. Of course, making a low-hydration dough would be easier. So why do they do it? Well, the more water you add to your dough, the greater the amount of steam it releases when baked. Trapping this steam within a strong gluten structure creates a soft, pillowy texture. The same one that makes high-hydration breads like Focaccia and Ciabatta impossible not to laugh. Pita bread usually sits around 55-60% hydration, but for Aish Baladi, the hydration is anywhere from 100-120%. It's what gives the bread the same thin skin and light springy inside that makes high-hydration bread so popular. This bread traces its lineage back to the time of the pharaohs, and it's so popular that Egyptians eat 250 million loaves every single day. In fact, it's the food I miss most whenever I leave Egypt. To begin with the dough, you first have to make a mother dough or starter to give the bread a subtle tang and special texture. These days, everyone has access to instant yeast, which gives bread a fermented flavor and creates the gas necessary for bread to rise. But it was actually ancient Egyptians who first discovered leavening, by saving some of their dough each day and adding it in the next day's batch. This allowed natural yeast to accumulate over consecutive batches, hence the term mother dough. But you don't actually need an ancient dough for this recipe. Instead, we'll make a type of pre-ferment called a poolish. The day before baking, grab a scale mixing bowl and some white all-purpose flour. This one is about 11% protein. We tried bread flour in this recipe, and the extra protein made the dough impossibly sticky and affected the rise, so stick to all purpose. Measure out 200 grams of flour and then pour in 200 grams of warmish water. To replace the natural yeast, add 1 gram, which is about an eighth of a teaspoon of dried active yeast or instant yeast. Then just mix everything together until you have a really wet dough that looks like pancake batter. Don't worry about any lumps, just cover the bowl and leave it to rest on your counter or somewhere warm for 12 to 16 hours. Overnight, the yeast will break down the flour, transforming it into this. After more than doubling in size, it's now packed full of yeasty bubbles. Those introduce the unique tangy flavor we're looking for, and have given the dough a superior gluten structure that will allow it to really stretch when baked. To turn that into Elish Beladi, break out a stand mixer with a dough hook attachment and scrape in all of the pre-ferment or mix the dough in a bowl. Add in 300 grams of all-purpose flour to bring the total used up to 500 grams. Then add 10 grams of sugar, 10 grams of salt, and a further 6 grams of dried active yeast. You'll also need 200 milliliters of room temp water. This will bring our dough up to 80% hydration, which is as close as we could get to 100% without making the dough a pain to work with. Before you add all the water, you need an initial mix to develop some more gluten. Add about 100 milliliters for now and turn the mixer to its lowest setting for a few minutes until all the loose ingredients combine into a shaggy dough. This looks good, so turn the speed up one level and knead for about 5 minutes. In total, this recipe has 3 gluten development stages including the pre-ferment. This second one is the most important to creating the serious gluten and open crumb structure in the final product. When the time's up, you should have a really stretchy dough that just keeps on stretching for miles. That's a sign of good gluten development, and now it's time to turn this back into a high hydration masterpiece. Turn the mixer back to low and pour in half of the remaining water. It'll splash around the bowl and this will look pretty weird, but trust the process. Eventually, the dough will loosen up and absorb the water, leaving you with this. Now turn the speed up one level and incorporate the rest of the water. As it mixes in, the dough will completely transform into a loose pancake batter. But then, after a few more minutes, it will start sticking to the sides of the bowl. Knead it for about 2 more minutes on medium speed for the final gluten development stage, during which these thin ribbons of gluten will form. Once it's done, you'll have a high gluten, high hydration dough that puts all other pita bread to shame. The stretch on this is simply ridiculous, and it's a good sign that your bread will puff like magic when baked. For now, all that gluten needs to seriously relax before the dough is used. So cover it and let it rest somewhere warm for 1-2 hours. The upside of making a crazy wet dough is that you don't need to roll it out into individual loaves. As it's quite liquid, portioning it onto a tray and letting it rest means gravity does all the hard work of rolling it out for you. And to make handling of the wet dough easier, the portions are laid on a bed of ground wheat bran. Just like how semolina stops high hydration pizza dough from sticking to a peel, the bran creates a non-stick barrier between the sticky dough and anything it touches. And that means you can bounce the loaves on your peel to spread them even further. But that's not the only reason to use the bran. It's also full of fibre and it gives the bread its signature malty-nutty flavour, so using it is a win-win-win. You can get coarse bran really cheap at health stores and online, and you just need to grind it down to a fine texture. Put a cup or two in a high-speed blender and blend for 15 seconds, then sift it to get flakes about this size. Process about 500g of bran and mix it with 350g of all-purpose flour to create this bran mixture. It might look like a lot, but trust me, you'll need it. Spread this out into a few deep trays in a layer about 2cm thick. The deeper this is, the easier it is to get the individual portions out later. Only about 5-10% of this mixture actually makes it into the cooked bread, but don't worry about wastage as any leftover bran mix can be packed away and reused the next time you make this bread. Once the dough has at least doubled in size or even tripled, it's ready to be portioned out. Use a spatula to release the dough from the bowl, gently knocking out the air in the process. This is now super relaxed, and you can really see the complex web of stretchy gluten that has come together. Now for the portioning. Fill a wide bowl with some flour, then wet your non-dominant hand so it's damp and press it firmly into the flour. You'll then portion balls of dough onto your floured hand. And while a wet ice cream scoop works if you don't want to get your hands dirty, it's harder to portion and control the size of the balls than just using your hands. I recommend using what I call the dangle and slap method for portioning out this high hydration dough. Let me break it down. Egyptian bakers grab a handful and slap it into their hand, then squeeze that into portions on the bran. We're going to do the same thing. Grab a fistful of dough with your dominant hand, then rotate your palm so the dough can dangle downwards. The weight of the dough will make it droop, then you quickly rotate your hand to slap the stretchy dough back into your palm. Do this a few times and the dough will form into a nice taut ball. Then you squeeze the dough between your thumb and finger till you have a ball about this big. Toss it in your hand a few times until that side is well coated in flour, then flip it unfloured side down onto a bran covered tray. Flour your hand again and repeat as many times as you need, leaving plenty of space around the pieces to expand. While it might seem complex at first, you'll quickly get the hang of it and it saves you the effort of rolling out dozens of individual loaves by hand. When your trays are filled, cover them with another tray of plastic wrap and give the bread 45-60 minutes to rest and relax. At some point, you'll want to get your oven preheating. If you're using a home oven, you'll need a pizza stone or steel or cast iron pan and preheat to 250 degrees Celsius or as high as you can go for about an hour. If you have a pizza oven, preheat to 350-400 degrees Celsius for 20 minutes. When your chosen cooking method is ready, grab a pizza peel and lightly dust with the bran. Then, using your fingers to dig down into the bran alongside a piece of dough, slide them underneath and gently lift the dough from the tray. The dough is still pretty wet at this point and doesn't have much structure, so you really need to support it with all 8 fingers. There's also a good amount of bran trapped on your fingers, so give them a bit of a wiggle and shake to release it. Then, transfer to your peel. Flour your fingers, then lightly pat the dough to shape and stretch it a little. To stretch it even more, bounce the peel a few times and that will kick out any leftover trapped bran. Give the dough one last shimmy to make sure it's not stuck to the peel and now you can head over to your oven and launch it right in the middle. In a home oven, the bread takes about 4-5 minutes. Watch for the full puff, then give it a few more minutes. It's ready once you start to see it taking on some colour. These are so hard to resist straight out of the oven, but it gets even better. In a pizza oven, these take only 90-120 seconds to cook through. Give it a rotate part way if your oven is one-sided like mine, then take your bread out as soon as it's lightly leoparded. Before you get carried away, these still have loads of moisture trapped inside, hence why they're stacked and rested at bakeries. Make sure you do the same so they don't go soggy. Tearing into it, you'll be greeted by the greatest texture you've ever known. It's soft and pillowy and has the signature jagged crumb that makes it such a pleasure to eat. No joke, Salma cracking this recipe was the proudest moment for our channel. If there's one way I recommend you use this, it's to make our favourite comfort food, the Ayesh Baladi Toastie. For us Egyptians, bread is literally life. The word Ayesh means both at the same time and that should tell you just how important bread has been to us for millennia. It was used as a currency by the ancient Egyptians and more recently as a rallying cry by millions during the Arab Spring. Bread, freedom and social justice. For bread like this, it's worth protesting.