I Believe The Sandwiches Are The Future

I had a hankering for Korean-flavored beef skewers grilled out on the porch, but lateness as always altered my plans a bit. The result was less elegant than it could have been, but sure tasted good. Plus, it’s a safe bet that nobody has ever made Korean-flavored water buffalo meatball sandwiches with ramps, charred green onions, pak choi, and homemade feta-yogurt-ramp sauce before.

The meatballs (from locally raised meat, of course) were full of freshly foraged ramps, plus a generous dollop of gochujang and a little pepper. I browned them hard, and took them off the heat while still nice and red inside. In the same pan, I threw fat green onion slices and seared them hard, then removed them and threw in some pak choi, then deglazed with a little red wine vinegar. The yogurt sauce was left over from Easter. The secret weapons, though, were the pitas that I made in the pristine skillet before I sullied it with all that meat.

What you do is take your fully (or partially, if you’re late) risen bread dough and divide it into pieces. Try it with the dough you make normally and see if it doesn’t work. This dough would have yielded an 800 gram loaf, and made six perfect pitas. Roll them into balls, and then roll those out into flat discs about 1/8″ thick. Make sure they’re on a floured surface, especially if the dough is on the wet side, or they’ll stick and tear and you’ll cry because you ruined dinner again. Let them sit while you get other things chopped or what have you. Heat your iron skillet, then reduce the temp to medium. Do not oil it in any way. After letting the circles sit for half an hour (or less, if you’re starving) put them in the pan one by one.

They start to puff up, and then fully inflate all the way to the edges…

And then you flip them over and they balloon even more…

And then you win dinner. Photography contests? Not so much. But I was so hungry by the time this was assembled that I gave up trying to make it look pretty. It tasted fabulous; a Korean-Middle Eastern mashup worthy of being street food in Blade Runner. I had another one shortly after.