Berek Turkish. The famous Turkish Burek pie is a recipe for a pie with various fillings. Techniques for preparing fillings

It is interesting to try dishes from different cuisines of the world. Better yet, cook them yourself. You can try to make berek yourself.

What kind of dish is this?

Berek is a dish related to Turkish cuisine, which consists of small baked bagels made from unleavened thinly rolled yufka dough or lavash. There are other designs: twisted cigar-shaped tubes and even a pie formed from tubes.

How to cook?

Preparing berek is not particularly difficult, so you can make it at home. Two options are described below.

Option one

This recipe uses the Turkish traditional yufka dough and you can make it yourself. The set of components will be like this:

For the yufka:

two glasses of water;
600 g flour;
Art. l. vegetable oil;
Art. l. table vinegar 9%;
tsp with a heap of salt.

For filling and soaking:

200 g of pickled cheese, for example feta cheese;
egg;
five tbsp. l. vegetable oil;
fresh parsley or other herbs of your choice;
egg;
three tbsp. l. natural yogurt without additives (can be replaced with yogurt).

Instructions:

Start with the test. Sift the flour and combine it with salt. In a separate container, mix all the liquid ingredients: egg, water, vinegar and oil. Gradually begin to pour the liquid mixture into the flour, knead the dough with your hands. Let it sit for about half an hour, then beat it with your hands and start rolling it into a thin layer. This can be done on a board or clean cloth. Prepare two rectangular layers.
Prepare the filling: either cut the cheese or mash it with a fork. Chop the greens and mix them with the cheese.
It's time to fill. Combine yogurt, egg and butter (leave a little for greasing the baking sheet). Beat this mixture with a mixer, fork or whisk until smooth.
Grease a baking sheet or mold with the remaining vegetable oil.
Place one layer of yufka in the mold first, then the other. Coat the dough with filling, place half of the filling.
Wrap the filling with the top layer of the yufka, coat it with filling and lay out the remaining filling. Cover everything with the remaining dough, coat it with filling again.
Bake the berek at 200 degrees until browned for about twenty-five or thirty minutes.

Option two

It is much easier to make berek from lavash. You will need:

packaging of ready-made thin pita bread;
a glass of natural, additive-free yogurt;
two eggs;
couple of st. l. olive oil;
400 g feta or, for example, cheese;
dill and cilantro;
salt (optional, as the filling will be salty).

Process description:

Get busy with the pita bread. Spread it on a flat surface and cut into triangles or rectangles.
Prepare the filling. Mash the cheese with a fork or grind with a blender. Wash the greens, dry them and finely chop them with a knife.
Prepare the fill. In a bowl, combine yogurt with eggs and butter, beat everything using a fork or mixer. Leave some oil, it will come in handy.
Now coat the pieces of pita bread with the filling using a pastry brush or spoon. Place the filling and roll into rolls. If you are using triangles, start rolling from the narrow part to the wide part.
Place all the preparations on an oiled baking sheet (you can cover the bottom with parchment), pour over the filling and place in the oven. Such bereks are baked for literally half an hour at 190 degrees. They should be well browned.

Simple recipes are discussed above, but homemade berek can have almost any filling, so experiment and add minced meat, vegetables and other products. Be sure to prepare a dish for your guests or family members to please them and surprise them with your culinary skills!

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees.

Peel the onion, cut it in half, cut each half again and cut into thin slices. Fry the minced meat in a frying pan, add the onion and simmer for 1-2 minutes. Set aside to cool slightly.
Yufka dough is a very thin dough and must be greased before using it. Mix water with oil and, using a brush, carefully grease all 3 sheets of dough well.

Beat the egg a little with a whisk, mix with sour cream, add to the minced meat. Add salt, pepper and mix everything well. Cut the tomatoes into rings. Crumble the feta, add chopped herbs and mix.

Take a baking dish (I have a 24 cm springform pan) and grease it with oil. Carefully place 3 sheets of dough on top of each other. Next, spread half of the filling in the sequence of minced meat + feta + tomatoes (you can add a little salt to the tomatoes on top). We take the top sheet of dough and wrap it inside, that is, we close the filling. On top of this dough we once again lay out the remaining filling in the same sequence: minced meat + feta + tomatoes.

Cover the entire pie with the remaining dough. Grease with oil (I greased with beaten egg and water) and put in the oven for 40 minutes. Cool and eat

Bon appetit

P.S. Yufka dough can also be called Phyllo
Filo or phyllo is a fresh, very thin, stretchable dough, sold in layers of 10 layers. Used in Mediterranean cuisine. The Greek word Phyllon means "leaf". The layers of dough can be paper thin or several millimeters thick.
Filo dough is widely used in Greek and Turkish cuisines in both sweet and savory dishes. In Turkish cuisine, baked goods made from this dough are called borek or boregi, in Albanian cuisine - byrek, and in Austrian-German-Hungarian cuisine the dough is called blatterteig (strudel is baked from it). Paper-thin phyllo pastry sheets contain less fat than all other types of pastry. When cooking, each layer is brushed with melted butter or olive oil to achieve a crispy result.

Everyone's favorite börek is Su böreği. Su börei (su boregi) or water pie. I bake my böreks only from ready-rolled dough (Turkish yufka), so I have a lazy version.

But for real su boregi, we knead the dough ourselves. I only know the theory. The dough is mixed with a large number of eggs, thinly rolled out into layers and boiled in boiling water for 2-3 minutes. That’s why it’s called “water pie” (su boregi). All layers of dough are then generously greased with oil and only then filled with either cheese or meat filling.

Very tasty, but, in my opinion, very fatty. I offer my lightweight version, both in terms of time and effort, and in terms of calories.

Ingredients:

3 Turkish yufkas (thinly rolled out unleavened dough circles)

300 g white cheese (brynza or cottage cheese)

1 bunch of parsley

pinch of salt and black pepper

To soak the dough:

2 tbsp. milk

2 eggs

6 tbsp. vegetable oil

For the top of the pie:

1 tbsp. mineral water (with gas)

* Ingredients are for a medium-sized oven with a 30x35 cm baking tray. For a standard large oven, double all ingredients or use a baking dish.

First we prepare the filling.

The filling should taste salty. In my refrigerator I had overly salted goat cheese and completely unsalted lor peiniri (cottage cheese). So I mixed both types in half, and it just tasted pleasantly salty. Mash the cheese in a bowl with a fork.

We wash a bunch of parsley, tear off the leaves and not very finely chop them with a knife. Add to the mashed cheese and mix.

Now prepare the egg-milk mixture to soak the dough. Break 2 eggs into a bowl, pour 2 tbsp milk and 6 tbsp vegetable oil (I used olive oil). Add salt, pepper and stir.

Turn on the oven at 200 C.

Now take a baking sheet, pour a little sunflower oil, and spread the oil with a brush over the bottom and sides of the baking sheet. Place the first yufka on the bottom of the baking sheet. We pull the edges of the yufka towards the center with folds, leaving the edges hanging down so that they approximately touch the tabletop. We will later need the hanging edges for hems.

In my photo I have half a yufka and a small uniform (15x25cm). I made a small berek from one yufka, since no one in our house likes bereks with cheese filling.

Using a ladle, pour the egg-milk mixture more or less evenly. It is not necessary to try to fill all areas, then everything will be distributed anyway.

We take the second yufka and, starting from the edge of the baking sheet, again cover the filling with random folds. Using your hands, distribute the folds more or less evenly across the baking sheet. Pour the filling with a ladle and add the remaining filling.

Similarly, lay out the last layer of yufka. Pour out the rest of the filling and tuck the hanging edges of the yufka towards the center.

Using your hands, lightly press the cake in several places. The filling will come to the top and “flood” the entire cake. This is normal; everything will be absorbed into the dough during baking.

Cut the burek into portions and... fill it with a glass of sparkling mineral water. This will give the börek additional tenderness and fluffiness.

Place the börek in the oven for 15-25 minutes, depending on your oven. After 15 minutes, we begin to check for the presence of a golden baked crust. The börek will swell to twice its original size and seem to “overflow its banks.” Don't worry, this is normal. Then he will settle down.

Remove the browned borek from the oven and leave to cool and settle. Cut into portions and you can serve them warm. Turkish böreks with cheese filling are served both warm and cold. Not for everyone, as they say...)

Step 1: cut the yufka.

We take the packaging of the yufka and open it. On a large cutting board, cut Armenian lavash into 4 equal parts. As a result, we should get such huge triangles. We put them aside.

Step 2: prepare filling No. 1.

Using a coarse grater, grate the cheese and place it in a small bowl. Wash the parsley thoroughly under running water, then place it on paper towels and blot it a little to get rid of excess moisture. When the greens have dried a little, finely chop them on a cutting board and then mix them with the cheese. Mix the cheese and parsley thoroughly.

Step 3: prepare filling No. 2.

Take the onion, peel it, wash it thoroughly under running water, wipe it with paper towels and finely chop it on a cutting board. Then take any small frying pan, pour a little vegetable oil (sunflower or olive) into it, put it on high heat, wait a couple of minutes for the oil to heat up thoroughly. Pour our finely chopped onion into the already heated oil and fry it over low heat. Try to constantly stir the onion with a wooden or metal spatula to prevent it from burning. When the onion becomes transparent, add our minced meat to it in the pan and mix everything well. In the process of frying minced meat with onions, try to constantly separate and crush the lumps of minced meat right in the frying pan, otherwise you will not get the filling, but a couple of pieces of minced meat with a small splash of fried onions. While the minced meat and onions are fried over low heat, take the potatoes, peel them using a potato peeler, wash them thoroughly under running water and grate them into a plate using a coarse grater. Then it should be added to the frying pan with the minced meat and onions. Simmer everything until cooked over low heat, stirring constantly, at the end of cooking, add a little salt and pepper to your taste, and also add finely chopped parsley. By the way, you can add parsley if you wish; this is not a fundamental requirement.

Step 4: prepare the filling.

We take chicken eggs, three jokes. Take a deep bowl. Place your hand over the bowl and use a knife to make a crack. Using a knife, moderately hard, hit the egg so that a crack forms, then put the knife on the table, and now with both hands we carefully push the crack into two halves to release the insides of the egg from the bowl. Make sure that the shell does not fall into the bowl, but if it does get there, then with the help of that knife you can always remove it from there. We repeat this with the other two eggs. When all our eggs are broken into a bowl with a fork, beat them until smooth. Then add vegetable oil (olive oil is best) into the egg mass, mix everything thoroughly until a homogeneous mass is obtained. Now carefully pour mineral water into the egg-oil mixture, stirring constantly (as already indicated in the ingredients, I advise you to take Borjomi mineral water). Mix everything again and that’s it, our filling is ready.

Step 5: form the berek.

Now we carefully take our yufka from the plate, put it on the board, and on its very edge we begin to spread our filling using a teaspoon or tablespoon. Next, we carefully begin to roll the pita bread into a long tube. Try to place the meat filling on one triangle and the cheese filling on the other. Take a baking sheet, wash it thoroughly and dry it thoroughly with paper towels. Using a pastry brush, lightly grease the baking sheet with olive oil. Then we place twisted berek tubes on it. We place the tubes on a baking sheet in a checkerboard pattern, that is, first we put one tube with the meat filling, and then a tube with the cheese filling. Simply put, we alternate them between each other. All tubes should be laid out quite tightly to each other. Since we will have a lot of berek, I advise you to use several baking sheets at once, as I did. True, I laid out the tubes rectangularly on one baking sheet, and in a spiral on the other.

Step 6: place the berek on a baking sheet.

When all the bereks are laid out on a baking sheet, pour everything generously with our filling. I found it convenient to pour the filling using a small cup. As for me, it’s much more convenient to do it this way. The main thing is that all the berek tubes are completely filled with filling from above and then they will be perfectly soaked in the morning. Then cover the baking sheets with plastic wrap and place them in the refrigerator or other cool place (if you don’t have enough space in the refrigerator to place the baking sheets). It is best to do this in the evening and prepare berek in the morning for breakfast.

Step 7: bake the berek in the oven.

In the morning, the next day, remove the baking sheets with berek from the refrigerator (or other cool place) and leave them for a short time - so that they become room temperature. While our berek is standing and “warming up,” we move on to our oven. Warm it up on 180-200 degrees Celsius. Then, in the middle of the preheated oven, place our baking sheets with berek and bake them until they acquire a golden color.

Step 8: serve Turkish berek.

When the berek is baked, remove the baking sheet from the oven, place it on a wooden hot rack and cover for 10 minutes waffle towel. Then, carefully dividing them into tubes, we take out each of them with a culinary spatula and place them on a serving dish. You can serve Turkish berek either hot or chilled. Bon appetit!

I advise you to choose pork and beef as minced meat. This combination is most pleasant to taste in any dish.

If your minced meat is frozen, you should defrost it naturally before cooking. To do this, you just need to place it in a bag under hot running water for a couple of hours, or transfer it to a plate that should be placed near a hot stove. When the minced meat has melted, excess water and blood should be drained from it. Under no circumstances should you defrost minced meat in the microwave, otherwise you will not only spoil it, but also activate harmful microbes. In addition, your microwave oven will then acquire the smell of defrosted minced meat for a long time.

If you don’t have ready-made minced meat, you can always cook it yourself. To do this, you should take a piece of beef and pork tenderloin and pass it through a meat grinder several times. It is believed that the most delicious minced meat is minced minced meat. That is, you take a piece of meat and just finely chop it into small pieces on a cutting board.

After you have prepared the filling, try not to keep it in a bowl for a long time, but immediately, if possible, pour it over our berek on a baking sheet. The maximum storage time for filling in a bowl is 10 minutes.

From the entire package of yufka I got 32 tubes. The package itself contained 8 sheets of pita bread.

You can store berek on a baking sheet (before baking) in the refrigerator for up to 5 days, but despite its deliciousness, this is not so easy.