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Perfect Pita and Palestinian Pizza
In Jerusalem, in the old city, there are bakeries. As you walk down the narrow, roofed-over streets, occasionally you'll catch a wafting smell of fresh baking. Follow your nose. Most of the bread being baked is pita - puffy and dusty-sweet. If you can see into the oven, you can watch as the dough goes from a raw, flat, white round to a toasty-tan balloon in about 30 seconds, before either it tumbles from the oven's mechanical conveyor belt or it is yanked skillfully from the brick oven and tossed onto a large wooden tray to cool. 
The bakeries were of all sorts. A basement of a basement with what looked like a kiln built into the back wall at the very bottom - stacks of trays of dough on one side and fresh pita piled high being hauled up and out onto the street for delivery as soon as the tray was piled high enough. Or a one-room workshop on a side street with an ancient (though not on the middle-eastern timescale) mechanical pass-through oven with a metal-plate conveyor. 
And that doesn't even consider the semi-industrial operation I saw in a Jordanian bakery where the pita oven was on the upper floor and the pitas cooled as they whizzed down a chute to land on the counter next to a man who had to package them up in equal-sized bags - very quickly, I should add. 
I found the baker with the conveyor-belt oven because of the trays he had arranged outside his workshop from which he was selling fresh pita and what he called Palestinian Pizza. Basically pita dough topped with stuff and sent through the oven, he had two kinds: a "normal" pizza with tomato, cheese, and olives, and "the real thing" topped with a paste of za'tar and olive oil. 
The real thing, reheated briefly in the oven, was sweet, salty, oily, hearty. And hot. It tasted like a hot day in Jerusalem - dusty, and even a little gritty, but with that perfume of eucalyptus and olive. It tasted old. And it was just right.
The bakeries were of all sorts. A basement of a basement with what looked like a kiln built into the back wall at the very bottom - stacks of trays of dough on one side and fresh pita piled high being hauled up and out onto the street for delivery as soon as the tray was piled high enough. Or a one-room workshop on a side street with an ancient (though not on the middle-eastern timescale) mechanical pass-through oven with a metal-plate conveyor. 
And that doesn't even consider the semi-industrial operation I saw in a Jordanian bakery where the pita oven was on the upper floor and the pitas cooled as they whizzed down a chute to land on the counter next to a man who had to package them up in equal-sized bags - very quickly, I should add. 
I found the baker with the conveyor-belt oven because of the trays he had arranged outside his workshop from which he was selling fresh pita and what he called Palestinian Pizza. Basically pita dough topped with stuff and sent through the oven, he had two kinds: a "normal" pizza with tomato, cheese, and olives, and "the real thing" topped with a paste of za'tar and olive oil. 
The real thing, reheated briefly in the oven, was sweet, salty, oily, hearty. And hot. It tasted like a hot day in Jerusalem - dusty, and even a little gritty, but with that perfume of eucalyptus and olive. It tasted old. And it was just right.
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