One Small Bread for Man

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 by Rotem Yaniv

 

I tried everything from starch-reinforced fiber polymers to precast Hummus, adhesive garlic sauce to super glue. Yet for all this effort, I’m still unable to make a pita that doesn’t rip.

Some people wander aimlessly through life. They work and marry and have children. Not everyone can take greater challenges than those. I’ve been working on this problem for over a decade, pushing my limits, breaking the crust, leading Canada toward a better future—for our children’s children!

I started working on this project after visiting a strange prehistoric region stuck between three continents and full of camels and tourist attractions. War, the economic crisis, and the constant heat pushed the people living here to develop advanced techniques for what seems to us Canadians as basic necessities. I had many adventures. I drank beer in a pub after 2:30 am, got arrested for smuggling pork in my bag, and almost got eaten by an ostrich.

Exhausted and starved, I walked into a bakery and asked the owner for some bread. He immediately loaded a box full of little rolls that tasted like pizza and baklava and large triangular dough filled with goat cheese and square butter puffed pastry filled with mushroom and mashed potato and, with the discrete smile of a person about to cheat a foreigner and make the day’s income in one sale, charged me 23 cents (Canadian, after tax).

I insisted on bread and the man said, “Pita?” Without waiting for me to answer, he threw at me a fresh, fragrant, warm disc of baked goodness that melted in my mouth and tasted like that heavenly stuff the sons of Israel ate on their 40-year camping trip back in the day. It was the exact opposite of pitas in Canada.

Trying to find the recipe proved troublesome; I’m still looking for it. Every time I asked one of the natives they told me their great-great-grandfather was given the secret of pita in his dream, when an angel came down from the sky on a ladder carrying flour and baking powder. This angel gave them a recipe founded on ten guiding principles, such as “Thou shall not use preservatives” and “Respect your water and your flour.” In any case none of the natives would tell me how to create that effective, load-bearing, tensile, workable pocket of bread that is able to sustain a litre of tahini and several tons of Shawarma.

I returned to Canada and started experimenting with different formulas I would find in ancient cook books and rare YouTube videos. Nothing worked. The closest I got to success was a sturdy, non-edible brown disc my kids threw for the dog to catch. I hated that dog. The success was that I never saw it again.I turned to more advanced techniques. First of all, I needed to find a way to create a pita with similar texture and durability. Taste, as with all Canadian pitas, wasn’t really a concern. I rented a laboratory and tried reinforcing dough with different types of rubber, fiberglass, and ground sesame seeds. All I got was the usual brittle tortilla anyone can find at Loblaws. I pre-tensioned and post-compressed it to allow for better sauce retention, but the bread was not uniform and crumbled in my hands. I brushed it with egg and baked it to a golden brown, but still no pita.

Pitas haunted my dreams. I started waking up in the middle of the night, screaming for hummus with my kebab. My wife left with the kids and married a butcher. I spent all my money ordering boxes of the real stuff on Ebay, but it never tasted the same coming from a plastic bag as it had from those desert pita boutiques. I lost my job after my boss found me sniffing flour in the washroom. Just like the pitas here, I couldn’t hold it, and I cracked.

I was a broken man, frustrated and smelling like yeast. I concluded there was only one other way to solve my situation, one final resort, one desperate path – I started a non profit organization. In the name of sacred pastry, I gathered brave men and women and went out to the street to protest the inhumane attitude of Canadian bakeries. I organized rallies and picketed in front of the Parliament and the Byward Market store that sells Barack Obama cookies. I was there with the elite of the social-front groups, pushing for a better society, making a stand, sending thousands of messages on Facebook. I tried. I really tried, but finally I had to face the futility of it all. I left my house and moved to a small cardboard box shaped as a pyramid. I asked people in the street for spare bread. My hope for a nutritious container that doesn’t taste like drywall and is able to carry Hummus, fries, and salad at the same time without any rupture, went stale and full of mold. I still experiment sometimes, breaking into labs and pizza parlors to try different recipes. I hope that some day I will reach my dream, fulfill my destiny, and make a pita that doesn’t hurt the environment. I will change the world, you’ll see! You’ll see!But if not, I can only hope for my sons’ generation and those that follow, that some angel will come to one of us in a dream, tell us some grand culinary secret, or at least how to make Falafel.