Pita

Pita (/ˈpɪtə/ or US: /ˈpiːtə/; Greek: πίτα) or pitta (British English), also known as Arabic bread (Arabic: خبز عربي, romanized: khubz ʿArabī), Syrian bread, Lebanese bread and as kmaj (from the Persian kumaj), is a family of yeast-leavened round flatbreads baked from wheat flour, common in the Mediterranean, Middle East, and neighboring areas. It includes the widely known version with an interior pocket. In the United Kingdom, the term is used for pocket versions such as the Greek pita, used for barbecues as a souvlaki wrap. The Western name pita may sometimes be used to refer to various other types of flatbreads that have different names in their local languages, such as numerous styles of Arab khubz ('bread').

The first mention of the word in English cited in the Oxford English Dictionary was in 1936. The English word is borrowed from Modern Greek πίτα (píta, 'bread, cake, pie'), in turn from Byzantine Greek (attested in 1108), possibly from Ancient Greek πίττα (pítta) or πίσσα (píssa), both meaning 'pitch/resin', or from πικτή (piktḗ, 'fermented pastry'), which may have passed to Latin as picta cf. pizza. In Levantine Arabic it evolved into fatteh, (since Old Arabic /p/ evolved into /f/). Other hypotheses trace the Greek word back to the Classical Hebrew word פת (patt, lit. 'a morsel of bread'). It is spelled like the Aramaic פיתא (pittā), from which it was received into Byzantine Greek (see above). Hypotheses also exist for Germanic or Illyrian intermediaries.

Some say that English borrowed the word directly from Modern Hebrew, which had revived the Aramaic term in the preceding decades. However, native Modern Hebrew nouns are characterized by final stress.

The word has been borrowed by the Turkish language as pide, and appears in the Balkan languages as Bosnian-Serbian-Croatian pita, Romanian pită, Albanian pite, and Bulgarian pitka or pita; however, in the Serbo-Croatian languages of the countries comprising the former Yugoslavia, the word pita is used in a general sense meaning pie.^{[citation needed]}

In Arabic, the phrase خبز البيتا (khabaz albayta, lit. 'pita bread') is sometimes used; other names are simply خبز (khubz, 'bread'), الخبز العربي (al-khubz al-ʿarabiyy, 'Arab bread') or خبز الكماج (khabaz al-kimaj, 'al-kimaj bread'). In Egypt, it is called eish baladi (عيش بلدي ʽēš baladi) or simply eish (عيش ʽēš, 'bread'), although other subtypes of "bread" are common in Egypt, such as eish fino and eish merahrah.

In Greek, pita (πίτα) is understood by default to refer to the thicker, pocketless Greek pita, whereas the thinner khubz-style pita is referred to as aravikí pita (αραβική πίτα, lit. 'Arabic pastry').

Pita has roots in the prehistoric flatbreads of the Near East. There is evidence from about 14,500 years ago, during the Stone Age, that the Natufian people in what is now Jordan made a kind of flatbread from wild cereal grains. Ancient wheat and barley were among the earliest domesticated crops in the Neolithic period of about 10,000 years ago, in the Fertile Crescent. By 4,000 years ago, bread was of central importance in societies such as the Babylonian culture of Mesopotamia, where the earliest-known written records and recipes of bread-making originate, and where pita-like flatbreads cooked in a tinûru (tannur or tandoor) were a basic element of the diet, and much the same as today's tandoor bread, taboon bread, and laffa, an Iraqi flatbread with many similarities with pita. However, there is no record of the steam-puffed, two-layer "pocket pita" in the ancient texts, or in any of the medieval Arab cookbooks, and according to food historians such as Charles Perry and Gil Marks it was likely a later development.

Most pita breads are baked at high temperatures (230–245 °C or 450–475 °F), which turns the water in the dough into steam, thus causing the pita to puff up and form a pocket. When removed from the oven, the layers of baked dough remain separated inside the deflated pita, which allows the bread to be opened to form a pocket. However, pita is sometimes baked without pockets and is called "pocket-less pita". Pita is traditionally served fresh from the oven (typically a wood-fired oven similar to a pizza oven). It is best either soon after baking or on the same day, and can be served warm.