This feels like a nice late summer meal. We usually eat it in August when we are at the beach for a week. My brother made it first and we all fell in love with the chicken. It is rather easy and quick to make if you don’t add on the makings of pita and yogurt. Of course, you can go to the store and buy the pita bread to split and broil with butter. You can buy the yogurt to make your sauce. It is easy and just as delicious. I am just going to take it a bit further here and show you the basics of making it all by scratch. So below, we will begin with fresh yogurt. We will follow with a Pita tutorial. Finally, a quick marinade of chickpeas and chicken thighs for a meal that satisfies lunch or dinner, when the weather is still warm.

Making yogurt is a lot easier than you might imagine. To think that yogurt was discovered by accident. Some things just happen because they are meant to. Yogurt can be traced back to around 5000 to 6000 BCE. As was butter discovered, so was yogurt, on the back of animals during travel. Milk was stored in pouches made from animal skins and animal stomachs. They hung against the sides of the warm pack animals. The combination of the heat from the animals and the bacteria from the animal skin bags naturally fermented the milk, changing it’s sugars into lactic acid. The acid would then thicken and curdle the milk. It became tart in flavor and spoiled less quickly than the fresh milk.

To do this at home, all you need is a pot, a thermometer, a blanket or towel, milk and a little bit of yogurt to get you going. If you would like to make you yogurt a bit thicker, also known as greek yogurt, that you will also need cheese cloth, a colander and a bowl.

We will be making yogurt for the purpose of this meal and our other meal this month of Butter Chicken with Spinach Naan. Both the pita dough and the naan dough call for yogurt, as well as the marinade for the butter chicken. We will be making a yogurt sauce to flavor our dishes with a tart and fresh finish.

And, although we won’t be focusing on it here today, you can jar and sweeten your yogurt with honey, vanilla, jams, berries and fruit for a morning breakfast or healthy evening dessert.

A YOGURT VIDEO TUTORIAL

This recipe comes from Jennifer Latham. She is a fellow baker I met on one of my trips to Tartine Bakery in San Francisco. I think I have mentioned her before, as she gifted me a big box of used bread baskets from a Tartine closet when I was opening the Dutchess. I was told we had a very small budget for the bread program so I was scrambling to gather what I needed. She came through with flying colors. When we had first met, years prior, she told me quietly, over a bread bench full of shaped loaves, that she was pregnant. She hadn’t told anyone else. I think, because I was a stranger, and maybe because I was a mother, I was a safe place for her to share her news. She had twins. This recipe comes from her book “Baking Bread With Kids”.

I kept the formula the same, but decided to skip over the instructions for the one day process. Instead, I prefer to run this as an overnight dough. I think keeping it in the fridge overnight gives it more flavor and also gives you more flexibility with baking. So the tutorial here will guide you in that direction. If you would like all of her options I suggest buying the book. It is full of simple recipes for baking with children. This is a brilliant way to learn bread, as the explanations are simple and the formulas straight forward.

Once you have kneaded it all together into a nice ball, place it is a greased bowl and cover with plastic. Let it sit at room temperature for 1-2 hours. You can give it a turn around the 30 minute mark if you like, but I found it a very stiff dough to do much stretching and turning. After a couple hours, put it in the fridge to rest overnight.

Pull it from the fridge an hour or so before shaping so it can warm up a bit. When ready to shape, cut the dough into 10 equal pieces and shape into balls. Let rest 20-30 minutes.

Then, final shape into flat disks. I experimented with the thickness a bit as the recipe calls for the dough to be roughly 1/4 inch thick. I found that the pita didn’t puff up at that thickness and so I rolled mine closer to 1/8 inch thick. To get the desired puff of pita the oven needs to be hot and the dough needs to be thin enough so that the heat can reach the interior of the dough quickly to create steam. The steam is what puffs the dough. You have to be careful not to go too thin, or you will find you pita to be to crisp and cracker like. It is a fine line for perfection. I am not sure I nailed it, but I came close.

PITA VIDEO TUTORIAL

The day before I marinate the chicken thighs and the chickpeas. You can do it the day of too, but a little more time gives a little more flavor.

Then when you want to cook: cook and plate!

I figure there are two ways to eat this. You can plate it pretty with a dollop of yogurt sauce, a nice chicken thigh, a side of chickpea, some cucumber and lettuce and a tear of pita. It is classy and simple. The other way is to make a wrap. Split your pita, broil it with butter if you like, or just have it fresh. Spread on some yogurt sauce, place a piece or two of lettuce, a spoonful of chickpeas, sliced up chicken, a thin ribbon of cucumber, some chopped dill and a drizzle of olive oil. Salt and pepper to taste. Enjoy!