Pita sandwiches are great. Pita sandwiches are also terrible. Terrible in the, "Damn, the entire contents of my sandwich just fell out of this hole in my pita, and now there's a work of falafel modern art on my new white shirt," kind of way. You know what I mean. Other times the pita gets all soggy at the bottom because it can't hold up to the juices and dressings, a travesty. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
On a recent trip to Turkey, senior food editor Andy Baraghani witnessed a genius fix for the soggy pita epidemic while watching a vendor stuff shawarma. It's a simple technique that we really should have discovered years ago. Someone was asleep at the pita wheel there. I blame Andrew Knowlton. It's also a reminder that street food vendors are a wealth of information. They know exactly how to serve their food.
Instead of cutting the bread directly in half, trim a 1 ½" opening from the top. Flip that trimmed piece over and tuck it into the bottom of the pocket before filling it with whatever you happened to be craving. You're basically giving your pita a kevlar vest. That reinforced base absorbs the meat drippings and sauce that are key to the sandwich but can wreck a pita. No broken pita. No shirt casualties. Just a perfectly intact final bite.
