A month ago Lude Majkofci came to my house and showed me how she makes dough for pita. I finally took a stab at it myself and I have to report - it was a big success! Most importantly, I want to report how forgiving this recipe is. If you, like me, are a beginner at making phyllo dough, this is a great recipe to start with.
I wanted to make 2/3 of the dough that Lude had made so I started out with 700 g flour (type 550 in Germany, which is akin to all purpose in the U.S.), 1 big tsp of salt, and about 1 3/4 cup of warm water. I saw that the dough was a bit drier than Lude's so I added some more water. The dough became yucky to touch, rather slimy in fact. I thought I had added too much water so I added a bit of flour and finally I ended up with a dough that was just a little bit sticky, like Lude's was. Because of the time it took to get the flour:water ratio right I ended up kneading the dough for around 8 minutes, double what Lude did.
No matter. Rolling it out was a snap. I spread lots of flour on my countertop before beginning. The recipe was forgiving since it is okay if holes break in the dough. I was a bit afraid to oil the dough like Lude did so I used a pastry brush. I also brushed the top of the pita only with olive oil, nothing else, as a personal preference.
My filling was also a bit different. I also used 1/2 kilo of spinach and a bunch of green onions, but I threw in some dill and mint. I also used 300 g feta cheese and a tub of creme fraiche in the filling instead of Schmand and yogurt. I had bought it by mistake for another recipe and decided to use it here. I needed the spinach mix to be a little moist and that did the trick. I think next time I'll use yogurt or ricotta cheese. I ended up only using 2/3 of my filling (which makes sense since I only had made 2/3 of the dough). To use it up I'll try making homemade phyllo again soon. Hope this success wasn't a fluke.
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