When I wonder why Americans are so averse to making flatbread at home—or are simply unaware of their easy-bake potential—I search for an elusive truth. Maybe one requires a lifelong familiarity with the feel of flatbread dough, with the mechanics of shaping it, or some special baking tool.

Pita stands out among its many cousins. In Istanbul, they make bazlama, a soft, pillowy flatbread that should be an essential part of a meal. And I often make the Italian flatbread, piadini, in a cast-iron skillet, a recipe developed here at Milk Street. But pita is different.

Pita has a pocket. It doesn’t have to be folded over a filling; the filling gets stuffed inside. This has made it a uniquely useful bread for millennia. In fact, the term “pikta” comes from the ancient Greek which, when passed into Latin, became “picta” or, in modern terms, pizza.

With that etymology in mind, one can think of pita bread as simply a form of pizza dough. Flour, water, salt, yeast (at least for most recipes), and maybe a little yogurt, lard or oil for richness. So we began our pita journey with a pizza dough recipe that had been developed by our resident baker, Erika Bruce. Its singular characteristic is the use of buttermilk powder.

Let’s start with the challenges with pita. First, we wanted good flavor. All-purpose flour alone doesn't muster much. Second, we wanted an elastic dough that was easy to roll out. Third, we wanted a soft, but chewy texture to the bread. And, most importantly, we wanted a method for getting the signature “puff.”

The first step was to switch out half of the white flour for whole wheat. This added a ton of flavor, but we felt the pita was lacking chew. Out went the all-purpose and in went bread flour in its place; now we had better texture. Bread flour also has more gluten than all-purpose, which is helpful since whole-wheat flour has less. Gluten helps produce an elastic dough than can hold in the steam. And that steam is key to puff.

Second, the dried buttermilk powder. Not something many people have on hand; ¼ cup of whole-milk yogurt was a better choice. This produced a soft, elastic dough and a tender but slightly chewy baked bread. Yogurt is common in some flatbreads, such as bazlama, but is not used in most pita recipes.

And then, of course, there was the puffing. Why does pita puff? The moisture inside the dough quickly turns to steam while the top and bottom layers set quickly, trapping the steam inside. For that to happen, it is essential that the dough be rolled out thinly so that the oven heat can penetrate quickly. Otherwise, you get a thicker flatbread with holes, but not one large pocket. We suggest rolling to ⅛ inch thick, in contrast to other recipes that suggest ¼ inch. This gave us 10 individual pitas from each batch of dough.