Laffa (לאפה) is the large Iraqi flatbread that, in an Israeli street-food context, is less a sandwich on its own than the wrapper that defines an entire category of them. The angle is the bread as both vessel and structure: a soft, slightly chewy, plate-sized round with no pocket, so the sandwich it makes is a tight roll rather than a stuffed pouch. Everything hinges on it being fresh and warm. Pliable off the oven it folds around a heavy filling without splitting; cold and a few hours old it stiffens, cracks at the fold, and dumps its contents.
The build is the bread first, and the bread is unforgiving. A simple dough of flour, water, yeast, and salt is rested, divided, and stretched or pressed thin, then baked fast against the hot wall or floor of a taboon-style oven until it puffs slightly and goes flexible with brown blistering. Off the heat it is laid flat, the filling laid down the center in a line rather than heaped, and the whole sheet rolled into a long tight cylinder, often pressed seam-down on a flat grill to set it. Done well the laffa is supple enough to bite through cleanly while still holding everything in a firm tube, the filling distributed end to end so no bite is empty. Done badly the bread is overbaked to a brittle cracker that shatters, underbaked so it eats raw and gummy, or overstuffed past the point where it can close, so it splits down the seam and falls apart in the hand.
It varies almost entirely by what goes inside the same sheet. Shawarma carved off the spit is the workhorse filling, with hummus, tahini, chopped Israeli salad, pickles, fried eggplant, and amba layered along it; falafel is the standard meat-free version, packed with the same salad and sauces. Larger or wetter fillings push it further from a pita order, since the laffa can carry far more weight without a pocket to limit it. Plainer treatments, just hummus, or labneh with za'atar and olive oil, exist and deserve their own entries as builds. Every version returns to the same idea: a thin, hot, fresh flatbread strong enough to roll around a generous filling and good enough that it is never only packaging.