Börek falls into a very important category of Turkish cuisine and is universally popular. If you can learn how to make at least one of these tasty pastry delights - and it's not very difficult - you will win many hearts!
The most common Turkish börek recipes are below but there is an enormous, virtually infinite list of such wonderful pastries. We will start with these börek recipes and build up gradually!
Quite some months ago I made this Bundt Börek which is a savoury pastry baked in a ring mould called a Bundt pan. Using Turkish yufka I wrapped up all the goodness – in this case cheese, parsley and dill and covered and soaked the pastry in a mixture of eggs, yogurt and olive oil…
Kırma Böreğı, not as well known as other böreks, is what I call Scrunch Börek. It is super simple to make and there are absolutely no rules to follow. If you break the pastry it really doesn’t matter. The messier you get it, the better it works. It’s virtually impossible to go wrong with this…
Börek in the Turkish language refers to any dish made with a round sheeted dough called yufka. Sometimes yufka is called phyllo pastry but actually, it is not as flaky or as frail or thin.
It is believed that it originated from the Ottoman Cuisine and sultans were very particular how tender it should be.
On no account should it be tough to slice and if so, it has been worked too hard.
A börek can be prepared in individual little shapes such as triangles, rectangular pies or thinly rolled into a sausage shape.
Otherwise, it is generally baked in a large pan and cut into portions after being cooked.
The top of the börek is most often sprinkled with sesame seeds or nigella seeds known as çörek otu.
Interestingly enough, the Turkish word in slightly different forms is used in many other countries.
We have Burek recipes that are virtually the same in Croatia, Serbia and other Slavic countries and they have Boureki in Greece which would include the famous spinach and feta pies also known as Spanakopita.
Israeli Bourekas, Armenian Cheese Boreg as well as Albanian Burek recipes are very popular too.
The Turks have the equivalent which has various different names.
Spinach and cheese börek, cheese pastries, Turkish meat pies (beef börek), cheese and vegetable pies, peynirli boregi, sigara boregi also known as cigarette börek which are rolled pastries in the shape of a cigarette, hence the name.
The combination of ingredients to be packed inside the pastry make up wonderful dishes, such as Lamb börek, Beef and Pea börek, Potato and Onion börek, Aubergine and Beef börek, White cheese and parsley, spinach and leeks börek.
It seems as if you can think of a combination, it already exists.
The Popularity of the different types of börek varies from region to region.
Usually, the name of the börek dish is accompanied by a descriptive word referring to the shape, ingredients of the pastry, the cooking method or to refer to a specific region where it is typically prepared.
When you buy yufka it is already at full stretch and all one needs to do is place it on the baking tray or cut it into the required shapes.
Fresh yufka
Having said all I have about the wonders of yufka, the indispensible dough we use to make börek, I personally have never made yufka.
In fact I have avoided it! Life is so fast these days, not many of us at all would be willing to spend a couple of hours to roll out these huge, round sheets of dough.
Especially when it is just so easy to buy if you live over here.
In Turkey, the most common way to use this 'yufka' dough is to make the infamous böreks, where the sheets are laid over a circular 'tepsi' baking tray. (Baking trays in Turkey are always circular and many börek ovens and portable cake ovens are circular, although as the West slowly comes closer to Turkey, more Western ovens are definitely to be found here.)
The 'saç' iron sheet on which one cooks yufka sheets to make dried bread or gozleme (as you can just see sitting over the fire in the photo below) is always circular.
Many Turks today, especially in the villages and where we live, bake in their fireplace, where definitely a circular tray will work best. They can easily turn the food every so often for even baking.
None of my neighbours actually own an oven and most will light their fire in their kitchen every day and they will also have an outdoor oven / fire for the summer months as otherwise their kitchens would be literally 'Hell on Earth!"
Outdoor Cooking
To make these wonderful Turkish pastries, we start off with 'yufka'.
It is often made at home where the women will sit on the ground at a very low circular table and armed with a narrow, long rolling pin, a little similar to a broomstick but thinner, roll out sheet after sheet effortlessly. It is definitely an art.
In the picture below, you will see our neighbours have decided to make an event of this. Every household requires this dough as it is so incredibly versatile and incorporated into many daily meals.
Obviously, it is far more fun to make it in the company of others too so it is quite a normal practice for friends and neighbours to get together and make a day of it.
Here the ladies are rolling out the 'yufka' and then it is actually being cooked in single layers to use later as a dried bread, rather than be stuffed to make a börek.
This bread is stored in very high piles of a hundred or so, in a corner of their kitchen, lounge or bedroom and covered with a clean tablecloth to protect from dust.
Often a month's supply will be made at a time, which means the ladies will sit rolling out this dough and cooking it for the entire day until the required amount has been made.
When wanting to use one of these cooked, dried, stored bread, it is taken and sprinkled with a few drops of water then used as desired. It is quite delicious.
When the month of Ramadan is upon us, especially when it falls in the hotter part of the year, working during the day is very difficult at high temperatures.
This dried bread becomes a very important part of daily life and so for a month or so before Ramadan begins, these women will stock up big time, to ease their burden whilst fasting during daylight hours.
Ramadan is a time of major sharing of meals and general hospitality and charity, so more dried bread than normal is needed to be stored.
As time is 'of the essence' rather than creating this wonderful dough from scratch, we locals go down to the 'yufkaci' (dough seller) and buy as many circular sheets as required.
They will have been made that day and most likely within the last hour. You generally get 5 sheets to a kilo. It is also possible to buy it in packs of 5 to 7 sheets in the supermarkets too.
Packaged yufka has a fridge shelf life of around 7 days from when they are packaged but quickly deteriorate and if I have no way to get to a 'yufkaci' and have to buy them prepacked, then I will only get them with a minimum of 4 to 5 days to go on the expiry and try to use them that same day.
They should have a cool trip home too which makes it tricky for me as we are 20km away from the supermarket.
The car gets up to near boiling point by the time I come back from it sitting in the sunbaked car park in mid summer. Air con would be a lovely thing!
Once you have your yufka, you have many choices what you can do with it. It never ceases to amaze me how many different ways it can be used.
We are concentrating on using it for Turkish börek recipes but I can tell you, once you start playing with it, you might decide to make a stunning Apple Strudel with it or a chicken and mushroom pie.
It is probably the single most useful product to come out of the Turkish kitchen and if I ever moved away, it would definitely be the thing I missed most about Turkish cuisine.
Yufka reading for preparing boreks
Should you truly wish to make yufka, then here is a recipe.
As seen in the photos above, the ladies sit on the ground and roll out on a circular table with a long, narrow rolling pin to get the nice wide circles.