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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 internet is an amazing, if sometimes bizarre, twisty, enormous, and convoluted place. It has made it possible for us cooks to have one gigantic collective recipe box. And in said box tonight I discovered a very easy recipe for fresh pizza dough. It takes less time to make than to defrost that rock of dough in your freezer. And it seems a very flexible recipe that enables the creation of pizza both thick and poofy or thin and crispy, depending on how long you let it rise in the pan.
Here's the recipe, courtesy of this link:
3 C Flour (I used a mix of all-purpose and whole wheat)
1 package (.25oz) Yeast - active dry
2 T Vegetable Oil (I used olive oil)
1 t salt
1 T sugar
1 C warm water (110°F or 45°C)
Preheat your oven as hot as it will go.
Mix the dry ingredients and then pour in the wet and mix and knead. Knead as much as you like, though at least enough to make the dough smooth. Use a normal baking sheet, oil and flour the baking sheet, and then lay out the dough. Instead of rolling out the dough, just gently turn and stretch it between your hands before laying it in the pan. Then finish stretching it out in the pan.) Top with whatever you like. The interesting thing is that if you cover it and let it sit in a warm place it will rise, so just keep an eye on it lest it take over your kitchen!
And then bake it until it's done (about 15-20 minutes...)
I look forward to lots of experimentation with this recipe.
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.
