I short while ago I spied a recipe for Perfect Pita Pockets from @DomesticJules on Twitter. Ever since I’ve been looking for an excuse to make a batch. The presence of hummus in my fridge was reason enough, but the fine weather upped the ante, challenging me to cook these puppies (er, pitas) on the outdoor grill.

It had never before occurred to me to make pita bread at home. Their pockety nature  seemed a thing of magic to me. But as I’ve discovered, pita bread is actually much simpler than most yeast breads. There’s no need to let the dough rise, and there’s no delicate transfer of risen dough-ball to hot hot oven.

Making pitas is a lot like making a pizza base: you roll out a disk of dough and bake it, simple as that. And even simpler on the grill, where it’s easy to monitor the doneness of the pitas as they puff and blister on the hot grill plate (a process that takes less than a minute on both sides).

Jules’ recipe uses strong white bread flour, but I decided to be daring and subbed half the white flour for wholegrain spelt flour. All other ingredients remained the same. Jules rolled hers into four large, long ovals, but I made mine into six smaller, round disks. You could just as easily make little mini pitas. The choice is yours.

I also found it’s good to experiment with the thickness a bit. If you roll the pitas too thin, they don’t puff up as well, and the resulting pockets don’t have good structural integrity. No worries though; you can use these round flatbreads as wraps rather than pockets.