Your Colon Will Thank You

My standard breakfast is vegetable stew with some kind of meat in it, but making it is a big chore with a lot of cleanup afterward, so lately I’ve been having my other standard breakfast: the kibbutz breakfast.

I learned about this in Israel, while picking grapefruit every day. Kibbutzniks are supposed to be atheists, because their movement began in Marxism, but they have two meatless meals every day anyway, perhaps to avoid offending old people who like to fool themselves and pretend they’re keeping kosher. I’m assuming they still eat what they did when I lived there.

They provided boiled eggs, various raw vegetables, plain yogurt, hummus, really bad white toast, and something called porridge, which seemed to be Cream of Wheat. I think they also served cottage cheese, but I don’t recall for sure. I believe they served margarine, which is disgusting and probably unhealthy. They also had terrible jelly. They may have had raw oats, too. Back when I was there, kibbutzniks were not known for good taste in food.

When I picked the right things from the menu, I ended up with breakfasts that were healthy and reasonably tasty. Now that I’m in America, and I’m not dependent on kibbutz kitchen workers who make bad choices and can’t cook, I can do a better job than they did. I use pita instead of toast. I get or make better hummus, with lots of hot pepper sauce. I use full-fat cottage cheese, and I eat sour cream instead of yogurt.

As for vegetables, I like carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, red bell peppers, and hot pickled peppers.

It would be nice to have tahini, but making and using it are a lot of aggravation.

It works pretty well, and you can probably guess that constipation is not a problem for me. And I knock off my day’s fruit and vegetable requirement in one meal.

The big obstacle is the pita. It comes in tiny bags here, and it gets moldy fast, so I have to keep going to the store if I want to have pita on hand. The solution? Homemade pita.

I saw a bunch of recipes online, but they looked stupid to me. “Knead by hand for 10 minutes.” “Stir the yeast into warm water and wait until it foams up.” “Mix in half the flour and wait until it looks fluffy to add the rest.” Come on. Wives’ tales and mythology. I wasn’t going to mess with all that unnecessary labor. The fact that bakers did something stupid 500 years ago doesn’t mean I have to keep doing it today.

I got out one of my pizza dough recipes, and it worked great. In case you want to try it, I’ll provide it.

INGREDIENTS

180 grams flour
120 grams water
0.8 tsp. salt
1.5 tsp. sugar
1/4 tsp. instant yeast
1/2 tsp. oil, your choice

I used high-gluten flour, but I think flour with less gluten would be better, because eventually you get tired of chewing.

Blend the dry ingredients in a food processor with a chopping blade. If you make a lot of dough, use a dough blade. Add the water while continuing to process. As soon as the flour is wet, stop. A lot of flour will be stuck to the sides of the bowl. Use a silicone spatula to push it back down. Continue blending until you have something resembling dough. Wait 5 minutes. Add the oil and blend again for maybe 30 seconds. Done.

Remove it and stretch it in your hands a few times, turning it inside out and pressing it back together. Do this to put tension in the dough. Make a ball or disk and put it on a sheet of nonstick foil sprayed with a little oil. Cover with a glass bowl. Let it rise fully.

Preheat your oven to 500°, using a stone or pizza steel. Cut the ball in 4 pieces. Shape each piece into a new ball. Roll them out as thin as you can, like 1/16″. Let them sit for 20 minutes.

Throw each piece on the hot stone or steel. It will blow up magically by itself, creating an inner pocket. You know those bubbles that form in pizza crust? They’re the same thing as pita pockets.

Turn your dough after maybe 90 seconds and bake it until it looks right.

That’s it. Very, very easy. It will taste better than store pita, and you can make it every couple of days in order to avoid shopping trips. You can scale it up if you need bigger batches.

I use a lot of flour when rolling out dough, and instead of a rolling pin, I use a length of 2″ PVC pipe. Rolling pins are stupid. The only problem with the pipe is that I can’t put it in the dishwasher, but that doesn’t work well with rolling pins, either.

I suppose you could fry this stuff and end up with something like poori, but I don’t really know. I think you would have to replace some of the water with yogurt. The main blessing here is the method, not the ingredients. It should work with other kinds of bread.