What's the optimal size of Paomo pieces?

As the winter is close, a bowl of warm Pita Bread with Beef/Lamb Soup would be a lovely dish to enjoy.

A unique experience of enjoying this dish is breaking the pita bread by yourself. However, for friends who are not Shaanxi local, it's a little confusing how to adjust the size of the pita bread pieces to create the optimal texture.

Some pieces might be too big to fully absorb the essence of the broth. And someone heard that "the pieces have to be as small as the soybeans" or "the smaller, the better". Well, the result could be that the bread pieces are all "glued" to each other, losing their chewy texture.

In Xi'an, to cook the traditional Pita Bread with Beef/Lamb Soup, the bread pieces have to be as big as the peanuts, the big peanuts in particular. With this size, the bread can fully soak the soup, and the pieces are all independent from each other, without extra stickiness.  

To enjoy the Pita Bread with Beef/Lamb Soup naturally takes more time. While in casual chatting, you and your friends may have already disassembled the whole pita bread. The experienced eaters usually break the bread by themselves. The "breaking" could be a pre-highlight of making this dish (yes, your input could be part of the process), and also a fun way to learn the culture of this dish further.

As people's life pace is getting faster, it's kind of hard to develop the patience to break the bread piece by piece. To offer customers convenience, many restaurants purchase the pita bread-cutting machine. Some shops and supermarkets even sell pre-cut bread pieces.

Time has been saved quite a lot, yet there could have been more fun when you came up with the pieces with your own hands. The shape of the machine-cut pieces might be too "perfect" to well absorb the soup, for the edges are quite smooth and the hand-made cellular texture is missing. That's why those time-honored halal restaurants never used bread-cutting machines.