Pita

Pita or pitta (/ˈpitə/ or US /ˈpiːtə/) also known as Syrian Bread or Arabic Bread, is a soft, slightly leavened flatbread baked from wheat flour that originated in the Near East, most probably Mesopotamia around 2500 BC. It is used in many Mediterranean, Balkan and Middle Eastern cuisines and resembles other slightly leavened flatbreads such as Iranian nan-e barbari, South Asian flatbreads and Central Asian naan, and pizza crust.

Etymology

The first known mention of the word in English was in 1936. The English word is borrowed from Modern Greek πίτα. These all probably come from the Byzantine Greek πίτα 'bread, cake, pie, pitta' (attested in 1108). Some sources trace it to the Ancient Greek πίττα or πίσσα 'pitch/resin', while others characterize this as "unlikely" and trace it to Latin picta 'painted', itself supposedly from Greek πηκτή 'congealed'. Though the Modern Hebrew word pittāh is spelled like the Aramaic pittəṭā/pittā (which is related to Levantine Arabic fatteh), they are not connected historically. Other hypotheses trace it to Germanic or Illyrian.