hamburger with fried bread bun

Into a bowl warmed up with hot hot water, I put ...

* 3/4 cup hot water

* 1/16 teaspoon sugar

* 1 shallow teaspoon active dry yeast

* 1 rounded tablespoon AP flour

Whisked the the mixture around, scraped off the sides of the bowl, went outside to water the balcony plants, returned. The mixture had bubbled up with impressive virility. Sufficient flour was scooped out and dumped in the bowl, to create a stiff dough, approximately

* 1 + 1/2 cups AP flour

Then the resulting dough is stretched in the hands and folded, stretched, folded, flattened, rolled, folded, stretched, folded, you know, totally messing around out of the bowl and off from the work surface, like Silly Putty, squished and stretched until the autolyse could be felt at hand and the protein network could be observed coalescing. The dough never quite passed the stretchy  'window pane' test, because I'm lazy and careless that way sometimes. Had I been using bread flour instead of AP flour the stretchy protein network would have formed much more quickly. But I don't care. 

The entire work surface is oiled because the discs will go directly from work surface to hot pan. It makes the whole thing easier. 

This will not be pita bread because the bread discs are not rolled. This is more like a thick pizza dough that is fried instead of baked. 

If you want a pita pocket, then skip this step shown above. Merely allow the dough to rise once so that the tiny air bubbles created by yeast makes the density of the dough less compact, and forgo the second rising. After the dough rises, roll it on a work surface into the shape of a thick fat snake and divide the snake into segments. Roll each segment into a ball. Each ball will be less dense having active yeast in it than non-leavened dough would be, even though you're smashing it down again, it still has tiny air bubbles throughout. Now with a rolling pin, roll out each ball into the desired disc size. Do not roll it too thinly or your pita will have insufficient  substance to split into two discs connected at the edges. By rolling, you form a skin of dough on both sides of the disc that traps air. Essentially, you are forming a flattened dough balloon. When the disc is heated, either in a hot oven or on stove top, steam inside the disk forms without the ability to escape so a large bubble is forced to form between the two skin sides of the disc. It divides itself into two discs by intense heat. Tadaaaa, pita bread. 

But this is not pita bread. This is just regular bread that is fried, so a pocket must be cut into it. The advantage here over pita is that the disc is a little bit more bread-y. The advantage of frying instead of baking is speed and energy conservation. Plus it's more fun and cowboy-like. Shut up, it is.