The Experiment

Happy Sunday, dear readers.

Success! You CAN mix meat and veggies in a pita!

Last night, I decided to try something new. I knew I was gonna make a pita, but I wasn't sure how it would turn out. The reason for this doubt was because I was making pita with both meat and vegetable filling. While meat, vegetable, as well as cheese are common pita fillings, I've never seen meat and vegetable combined in a pita filling before. I had ground beef and spinach, and I wanted to use that for my pita.

Unsure, if anyone else had made a meat and spinach pita, I consulted the oracle known as Google for help finding a recipe. There was nothing in English, and when I searched the Serbian-language net, I did find one recipe for meat and spinach pita from Montenegro. I thank God for giving me the inspiration to watch cooking tutorials in Serbian because even though I've never been particularly proficient in the language, I now could read and follow a recipe in a language other than my dominant English. I looked at the ingredient list and though I had almost all the ingredients the recipe called for, I did not have sour cream. No matter, I would substitute a cup of milk instead.

There was one other novelty I was trying out with this pita. While at the swap meet a few weeks ago, I bought a 10x10 Corningware casserole baking dish with a lid. I'd washed it and was now ready to test it out with my pita. I intended to make the pita on my barbecue after the resounding success of my most recent attempt, but a summer storm blew through and not only put the kaibosh on that plan, but it cooled down the temperature enough to where I could run the oven inside and not turn my home into a furnace.

Using my handy dandy cast iron pan, I browned the meat, onion, and garlic. For spices, I added salt, pepper, a dusting of paprika, and a pinch of turmeric to enhance the flavor of the beef. I added the spinach last, but not before roughly chopping it. In the last pita I made using spinach filling, I didn't alter the spinach and I didn't like the way it lay for the filling. I decided to try the chopped spinach to see how well it lay in the filling. All this went into my mixing bowl filled with milk and beaten eggs.

Assembling the pita itself was actually much easier in this casserole dish than it was in the old recycled aluminum cinnamon roll tin I'd been using previously to bake pitas. The casserole dish is square, and the rectangular fillo dough sheets lay much better in that than in the round aluminum tin. I didn't even need to use that much oil to grease the fillo dough sheets between layers. Sure enough, the chopped spinach lay in the folds of fillo much better than they previously did. It wasn't until after I'd popped the pita into the oven that I realized I forgot to add the baking powder to the filling. To be fair, though, until recently, I had no idea that baking powder was used in pita filling. Growing up, nobody I knew used it. Baking powder helps the fillo dough puff up some, so that the pita isn't so dense.

After baking for about an hour or so until the top was a gorgeous golden brown color, it was time to answer the ultimate question: how did this pita turn out.

A better shot of the fillo and filling

The answer: delicious! The outsides were nice and crispy, the inside was nice and tender, and the filling wasn't too dense either! Having a dairy product in the filling definitely helps. Next time, though, I will add the baking powder. I may or may not use the sour cream too, given how satisfied I was with the milk, but if I get some, I'll use it just to see how it compares. But that casserole dish was a wonderful investment. For $10, I leveled up my pita baking to a whole new level. I don't have to be ghetto about my baking equipment anymore! Also, this pita confirmed that despite being somewhat rare, you CAN mix meat and vegetables in a pita filling, and it will come out tasting delicious.

I've almost gotten my pita making technique down pat. Thank you for bearing with me while I figure out how to make this classic dish from my ancestors.

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Success!

Hello everyone!

I reached a very important milestone yesterday on my journey to becoming a good cook. For the first time, I successfully baked a pita in my bbq! I made a meat pita because thanks to that damned power outage on Monday, the fillo dough and half-pack of ground beef were thawed out and needed to be eaten.

Mekike

I'd spent the morning making mekike, a kind of Serbian fried bread snack similar to a doughnut, using a Serbian-language recipe I borrowed from my favorite Serbian-language Youtube cook, Jelajelena Petrovic. However, I knew that for the pita, I was gonna have to cook it outside because I didn't feel like heating up the kitchen a second time to brown the meat. It took quite a bit longer to brown the meat on the grill than it would on the stove. I think it was my coals because this was the second time I was using them. I normally reuse coals when I barbecue because it stretches the supply of charcoal that I have, and out of a batch, I can usually get two or three grill sessions out of it before they're too spent to be used.

Though it was much better this time around than the last pita I tried baking on the bbq, there were a few minor mishaps with this pita. The first mishap was that I'd forgotten to add a spot of oil to my cast iron pan to fry the onions and garlic before adding the meat. I normally wouldn't forget this, but having one arm full of baby and the other holding my cast iron frying pan filled with meat, garlic, onion, and spices, it completely slipped my mind. Good thing the ground beef I was using was 80/20, so it wasn't too lean and there would be fat runoff from the cooking process.

The second mishap was that I ran out of fillo sheets! I thought I'd have enough, but as it turned out, I didn't. My husband then informed me after I mentioned this that the half-pack of ground beef I'd cooked was two pounds, not one like I thought it was. Now, I know for sure that it's one pound of meat per one roll of fillo dough. My husband didn't mind it, though. He's not crazy about breading.

Finally, the third mishap had to do with the coals. Aside from the low heat level coming off of them when I was browning the meat, they actually went out during the baking process! When I went outside about 20 minutes after setting the pita to bake in the barbecue, I saw that the coals had gone out and so I had to take everything off the grill and light a fresh batch. Once this task was completed and everything was put back on the grill to bake, I'd intended to come back out 20 minutes later to check on the pita.

Except, I fell asleep.

I was feeling tired and thought I'd close my eyes for a few minutes to recharge, and wound up dozing off for an hour or so. When I woke back up and realized how long I'd been asleep, I suddenly remembered that I still had that pita on the bbq! I thought for sure it was gonna be an inedible hunk of charcoal, but to my great relief, I saw the nice golden crust of pita when I took the lid off the grill to have a look.

Taken the next day. Yes, I had to eat some of it. I couldn't resist my creation

While there was a bit of charcoal smoke flavor in the top layers of the pita, the dish actually tasted pretty well. The simple spices of paprika, salt, and pepper all blended nicely with the flavor of the fillo dough. It actually didn't come out that greasy either, despite my accidentally pouring glops of oil on the fillo and the bottom wasn't terribly burned either. It was nice and crispy on the outside while tender on the inside, like a good pita should be.

My meat pita from the inside. I ran out of fillo dough and basically did a giant meat dump on the last layer before covering it. It still tasted good, though.

Despite the few mishaps, I was so happy that my pita came out so well. Now, I can try baking something else. My family and I went to the swap meet tonight and I bought a small square casserole baking dish that was sorely needed (I was hoping to find a 9x13 baking dish, but no one had it. I did notice an awful lot of small crockpots, though). I think maybe I'll make lasagna next. My husband would like that, though I'm not sure how to get past the cheese hurdle(I don't like ricotta cheese and he can't eat melted cheese). Time to do a little research on this...

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The Pita

Hello, dear readers!

Today, I was feeling ambitious. I decided to try out my bbq as an oven by making some pita.

I got the idea for tonight's dish from a Serbian-language cooking tutorial I saw from my favorite Youtube grandmother, Jelajelena Petrovic, called "Pita sa Spinacem" (Spinach pita). I knew when I watched her video that I had to try making this, but I hesitated because my husband views cheese as though it's the spawn of Satan. After I asked him whether or not he'd eat a spinach pita if I made one, knowing that it had cheese in it (I resolved to use feta, since it was the closest to what I observed the Serbian cheese used in the video to be) and receiving an answer in the affirmative, I then set about procuring the ingredients I'd need. The one conniption I had was whether we had suitable bakeware for the pita, but after digging around in the cabinet where we keep the pots and pans, I found an aluminum pie pan which originally housed a tray of cinnamon rolls from the store. My husband had saved up a few of those to reuse, and it was big enough to fit on the grill.

Baking the pita on my grill

Thank goodness it rained this afternoon, so the ground was nice and wet. I cleaned out the old crappy coals from the barbecue and after putting in a few fresh ones, I decided to light them using some paper towels soaked in cooking oil thanks to another Youtube tutorial I saw (I refuse to use lighter fluid because then the food tastes like it). It took a few sheets to get the coals going, but I finally got them lit. My husband was whining at me to use the propane stove, but I refused because I didn't want to burn myself during the transfer.

Unfortunately, I didn't take pix of the process because the baby was being exceptionally clingy and was throwing a crying tantrum because my making the filling and assembling the pita meant that I couldn't pick her up and hold her like she wanted me to. I was able to hold her while I fried the onions, garlic and spinach over the hot coals, but once the pita was assembled and on the grill, she went and nursed herself to sleep. Her tantrum had worn her out.

Pitas, as I alluded to in an earlier post, are classic Serbian food and generally don't require much in the way of effort to make. It's an ideal quick-n-dirty meal that can be thrown together in about an hour or so to feed a hungry family or party guests. I wasn't sure how it would taste, given that the coals are made of wood and tend to impart their flavor onto foods, but I was happy to give it a try since I was trying to avoid using the oven at all costs. After I put the pita on the grill to cook, I realized later that I'd forgotten to add milk to the filling. This minor error proved to be providential because as fate and the fickle monsoon weather would have it, another storm blew in and I had to cut the bbq baking time short so that I could take the pita inside. The milk in the filling would have made the fillo dough soggy and rendered it inedible at that stage.

My grandmother would call this "dead"

Despite being undercooked, the pita was cooked enough to the point where you wouldn't get food poisoning from eating it. And actually, it wasn't bad! Only the top layers of the fillo dough carried any hint of charcoal flavoring from the grill, but it wasn't bad. It blended nicely with the rest of the ingredients. When my husband woke up from his nap, he saw the dead pita and finished it off in the oven's broiler. Ironically, he rendered the feta cheese inedible to his standards when he did that because while the top was golden brown, the cheese melted and set off his gag reflex. I was disappointed because now it meant that he wouldn't eat my pita. My husband was also disappointed because he liked the taste, but he couldn't eat melted cheese cuz the texture triggers an adverse reaction in his throat (I think he's allergic to cheese, but it only happens when the cheese is cooked). We'll see about breakfast, after everything is nice and solid.

After a quick stint in the broiler. Much better

Would I do this again? Yes. I have another roll of fillo dough set aside for this purpose. Next time, however, if I can't use more spinach, I'll use half as much feta cheese. I'll also remember to add the milk to the filling, but I think the spinach could stand to have a good chopping so that it would fit easier in the folds of the dough. Also, I'll figure out a way to get the grill to light hotter so that my pita will bake properly. Despite the storm throwing off my timing, I'm genuinely pleased with how this came out. It was much better than my burek.

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