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Pita, pide, peda

Dether's picture
Dether

Pita, pide, peda

Been looking at a couple of recipes from a notepad I had while living on a farm in New Zealand in 1994. I've got a couple of recipes for peda - "Los Angeles peda bread" and "Armenia peda bread". Annoyingly I didn't note the source, but I'm guessing it was a US cookbook.

Does anyone know the story here - pita is the commonly used word for flatbread with a pocket, pide is Turkish, but is peda Armenian? (There are probably issues of how things are rendered from non-Latin scripts and whatnot and the etymology isn't clear at the best of times,  even more so for the possibly related word "pizza".)

We don't have much of an Armenian community here in the UK so peda is not something I ever see here.

AbeNW11's picture
AbeNW11 (not verified)
Dether's picture
Dether

That looks like something very different, though you never know, it might be linguistically related.

One of the recipes I've got is a ring shape, with a hole in middle filled by a small disc, and this seems to come up in a Google image search, but no idea about "authenticity".

 

 

 

AbeNW11's picture
AbeNW11 (not verified)

Armenian bread... http://www.fresnobread.com/

AbeNW11's picture
AbeNW11 (not verified)

Dether's picture
Dether

Yep, that's the type I've got in my notebook as Armenian Peda Bread.

Dether's picture
Dether

Hi Abe. Yes, I saw those when I was googling around.

Here are the ones I've just made, which were called Los Angeles peda bread in the recipe.

I then glazed then with a flour-water wash and sprinkled them with toasted seeds.

 

 

AbeNW11's picture
AbeNW11 (not verified)

What do they taste like? Nicely browned and with the addition of seeds I imagine very tasty.

Having a look at recipes it seems like they are varied. Bread made with shortening and sweet. But there's many different takes on it.

What would one typically eat them with?

Dether's picture
Dether

Thanks Abe.

They taste OK. I think they're a fun, social, tearing bread.

It's an old recipe, and I just wanted to test it. When I do it again though, I'll reduce the yeast or use a natural leaven/sourdough and give them a much longer ferment. That'll make them much tastier.

I'm having it with a hummus-type dip, but made with English-grown dried peas (from Hodmedods - a great company if, like me, you're sick of all the pulses for sale in the UK coming from China).

Oh, and I just discovered this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matnakash