Pita

Pita keeps about 2–3 days at room temperature, a week refrigerated, and 3–4 months frozen.

Keep it sealed — pita is thin and dries out faster than most bread, and dry pita loses the flexibility that lets the pocket open.

Freezing is the best option beyond a few days. Stack the rounds with parchment between them and freeze flat; they thaw in minutes at room temperature or warm directly on a dry pan.

To refresh pita, sprinkle it lightly with water and warm it in a hot oven or a dry skillet for a minute. This restores the softness and makes the pocket separate cleanly.

Fresh pita from a bakery has no preservatives and should be eaten or frozen within a couple of days.

Pita's structure comes from a very hot oven: the intense heat flashes the moisture inside the dough into steam, which inflates the round and forces it to separate into two layers. That is the pocket, and it is created in the first seconds of baking.

That thin two-layer structure is also why pita stales so quickly. There is very little mass to hold moisture, and an enormous surface area relative to the amount of bread, so it dries fast — and starch retrogradation, the recrystallization that constitutes staling, has a short distance to work through.

The same physics makes pita easy to revive. A little water and a few minutes of heat re-gelatinizes the starch and restores flexibility, more completely than with a thick loaf.

As with all bread, retrogradation runs fastest in the refrigerator and stops in the freezer, so freezing is the correct choice for storage beyond a couple of days.

Mold is the microbial failure. Commercial pita usually contains calcium propionate as a mold inhibitor, which is why supermarket rounds outlast bakery ones considerably.

Discard the whole package on any mold. Stiffness, cracking, and a pocket that will not open are staling — a quality issue, and largely fixable.