Bosnia Starter – Pita Pies

To start in Bosnia and Herzegovina, we opted to make pita pies! These look amazing when done properly and were delicious too! We used a recipe from At The Immigrant’s Table and chose the cottage cheese filling, although the butternut squash version looks delicious too!

The first element to the pita was the filling, a simple mixture of cottage cheese, feta and egg all mixed together. That was the easy bit over! Now it was time for the pastry.

The dough is solely comprised of flour, water and salt, which then needed a LOT of kneading to make it as stretchy as possible. We knew we needed to get this dough into translucent sheets later on, so the more gluten we could activate during the kneading now, the better!

Once the ball of dough was ready, we cut it into 4 pieces and rolled them out flat. These were then left to prove for a while, which gave us some time to figure out what we were going to do next!

Once the prove was finished, we moved to our dining table to make sure we had enough room! Each section was then delicately (and painstakingly) stretched from the edges, until it was as thin as possible. We used tea towels with writing to help us work out how thin the pastry was.

We did find that the pastry was very fragile so unfortunately we couldn’t make it as thin as we wanted, but we definitely gave it a good go! The filling was then added in 2 thin vertical lines down the pastry. The tea towels then came in handy again as we were able to use them to roll up each side of the pita, until they met in the middle. We then separated the 2 rolls to create 2 separate pitas. Each pita was then curled round like a snake and placed into the oven dish ready for cooking.

These were then baked until golden brown.

These tasted amazing. It’s not hard to make cheese-filled pastry taste good, but the sense of pride for trying out a new complicated technique made them taste even better!

Let us know if you have more successful attempts, we’d love to see them!