Börek

• 1. Introduction

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  Börek, burek, byrek, brik: one family of pastries answers to all of these names across the Middle East and the Balkans. The recipe starts with a thin, flaky dough such as filo. Cooks wrap or layer it around meat, cheese, spinach or potatoes. Some make a single large pie in a pan and slice it after baking. Others shape individual pastries. Most börek is baked, though some kinds are fried. A scatter of sesame or nigella seeds sometimes finishes the top, and it can be eaten hot or cold. Across the Balkan peninsula and West Asia, it often arrives with a glass of ayran or a bowl of yogurt. This documentary follows the pastry through several questions. Where does its name come from, and who first made it? How did a single idea of thin dough and filling become a dozen national dishes? And why does each kitchen insist its version is the real one?

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• 2. Name and Ancestry

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  The lexicographer Sevan Nişanyan traced the Turkish word börek to the Turkic bögrek, which comes from böğür, meaning kidney. He also noted that Siberian Turkic languages share the word. In Saqa it appears as börüök.

  A rival theory points to Persian. The Persian burak is a diminutive of būra, meaning stew, and it described any dish made with yufka, the filo-style sheet. Persian bureh goes back to Middle Persian bōrak. That in turn reaches the Proto-Indo-European root bher-, which meant to carve, cut or split. The pastry name shekarbura borrows from the same Persian source. Nişanyan allowed that the Persian word might itself be Turkic.

  A third suggestion, the Turkic root bur-, meaning to twist, runs into a problem. Sound harmony would require the suffix -aq. Yet Turkic languages written in Arabic script always spell börek with the letter kaf, never with qaf.

  The dish itself may be older than any of these words. One theory sees it as a descendant of a Byzantine dish called en tyritas plakountas, or "cheesy placenta". That dish came from placenta, a baked, layered dough and cheese dish of Ancient Greek, Roman and Byzantine cooking.

  Another account says Turkic nomads in Central Asia made early versions before the seventh century. Those recipes would then have travelled west to Anatolia in the late Middle Ages. Börek was certainly popular in Ottoman cuisine, and it may have reached the Ottoman court. In Turkey today, the name has grown into a whole vocabulary of its own.

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• 3. Turkish Varieties

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  Su böreği, literally "water börek", starts with sheets of dough boiled briefly in large pans. Cooks then fill them with feta and greens, brush them with butter and bake them in a masonry oven.

  Turkish cooks add a descriptive word to börek to mark the shape, the filling or the place. Sigara böreği, or "cigarette börek", is a thin roll of yufka filled with feta, wiener sausage, potato or something else, then deep-fried. Paçanga böreği is a larger roll in the same style. Its filling is cheese, pastirma, tomato, parsley and pepper, all chopped small. It is fried and served hot, and it is a specialty of Anatolia.

  Talaş böreği, or "sawdust pastry", is also called nemse böreği. These are small squares filled mostly with lamb cubes and green peas. Their starchier yufka makes them puffy and crisp.

  Kol böreği, or "arm börek", is prepared in long rolls, either rounded or lined. Cooks fill it with minced meat, feta, spinach or potato and bake it at a low temperature. Sarıyer böreği is a smaller, fattier version named after Sarıyer, a district of Istanbul. Laz böreği turns the idea sweet, with a muhallebi filling and a dusting of powdered sugar.

  West of Turkey, the pastry changes shape again, as Balkan bakers coil it into spirals and rounds.

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• 4. Balkan Layers

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  In 2012, Lonely Planet included the Bosnian burek in its book "The World's Best Street Food". In Bosnia and Herzegovina, people eat it at any meal of the day. The classic version is meat-filled, rolled in a spiral and cut into sections. The same spiral has other names depending on the filling. With cottage cheese it is sirnica. With spinach and cheese it is zeljanica, and with potatoes it is krompiruša. All of them are generically called pita, and eggs bind the sirnica and zeljanica.

  The town of Niš in Serbia claims the recipe for "round" burek. According to the account, a famous Turkish baker named Mehmed Oğlu brought it from Istanbul in 1498. From the southeast, meaning southern Serbia, Kosovo and North Macedonia, it spread to the rest of Yugoslavia. Niš now hosts a burek competition and festival called Buregdžijada. In 2005 bakers there made a burek 2 metres across that weighed 100 kg. It is considered the largest ever made.

  In Serbia, Albania, Kosovo, Croatia, Montenegro and North Macedonia, bakers alternate layers of dough and filling in a circular pan. A final sheet of dough goes on top. The traditional versions are prazan, meaning "empty" and baked with no filling, or filled with stewed minced meat and onions, or with cheese. Modern bakeries add apple, sour cherries, potato and mushroom. Croatia received the pastry from Croats of Bosnia and Herzegovina and from Albanians. Zeljanica, made with spinach or chard, is common throughout the Balkans.

  Albanian byrek is traditionally built from several layers of hand-rolled dough. Street vendors called byrektore sell small triangles, while home cooks bake one large pie and cut it up. The two main categories are byrek shtëpie, the house byrek, and byrek trekendësh, the triangle byrek. Fillings include gjizë, a salted curd cheese, and ground meat with onions. Others are spinach with eggs, pumpkin, nettles in byrek me hithra, and kidney beans in byrek me fasule, a winter favorite. Southern Albania also has lakror, a greens or meat pie. In the north and in Kosovo, fli stacks layers of flour-and-water batter with cream and butter. Like lakror, it is traditionally baked on embers.

  Bulgaria treats byurek as a variation of banitsa. It is banitsa made with sirene cheese, plus eggs. The name has spread to similar dishes, such as chushka byurek, a roasted pepper filled with cheese, and tikvichka byurek, which uses squash and eggs. In Slovenia, burek is a widely available fast food, especially among students and in urban nightlife. It carries complicated associations with its Balkan origins, and not everyone counts it as Slovenian cuisine. Greece, to the south, had its own names for the idea.

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• 5. Greek Pies and Sweets

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  The Greek city of Serres is said to be the birthplace of bougatsa. This pastry puts semolina custard, cheese or minced meat between layers of phyllo. Today it is most popular in Thessaloniki, in Central Macedonia. On the 1st of June 2008, Serres set a record for the largest puff pastry. It weighed 182.2 kg, stretched 20 metres and took more than 40 bakers to make.

  In Greece the small pastries are called boureki or bourekaki, and on Cyprus they are poureki. Greek pastries of this family are also called pita, meaning pie. Galaktoboureko is the dessert branch. It layers custard and filo and is covered in syrup. The custard is a pudding called muhallebi, or a semolina custard. It is popular in Greece and Cyprus, and it used to be popular in formerly Greek and Byzantine parts of Anatolia.

  Tiropita, or "cheese-pie", uses layers of buttered filo around a cheese and egg mixture. It comes as an individual free-form wrap or as a larger pie cut into portions. When made with kasseri cheese it can be called kasseropita. Spanakopita takes its name from spanáki, meaning spinach, and pita. It is a savory spinach pie that often includes cheese, typically feta, and in that case it may be called spanakotiropita. A version without cheese and eggs is eaten during religious fasts throughout Greece. Cookbooks, restaurants and hotel menus all feature it.

  In Epirus, the town of Konitsa is known for skerbourek. This marzipan-like sweet, flavored with rose water, is traditionally offered at weddings, engagements and during Lent. It was considered a difficult dessert because the aroma was so rare and refined.

  The pastry also left traces in names elsewhere. In Venetian Corfu, boureki was called burriche and filled with meat and leafy greens. The Pontian Greek piroski takes its name from borek. It is almost identical in name and shape to the Slavic pirozhki of Russia. Farther east and north, other communities shaped their own versions.

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• 6. Eastern Edges

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  In Armenia, byorek or borek is dough folded into triangles and stuffed with spinach, onions and Armenian cheeses, or with ground beef. Panri borek, the cheese version, is the most widespread in homes and bakeries. Its filling uses cheeses such as lori, chechil or motal, often with tarragon or parsley. In some regions bakers use lavash instead of phyllo. It is served at breakfast or at festive gatherings.

  Msov borek, "meat borek", holds seasoned ground beef or lamb, often with onions. It is usually fried and served hot. Among the diaspora, fried triangles are especially popular on meze platters for New Year's and Easter feasts. Spanakhov borek is filled with spinach and cheese, and sometimes eggs or onion. It is eaten warm or cold, and cooks make it without dairy during Lent.

  On the Moldavian west bank of the Pruth, the burechiuşe are small square dumplings. They are filled with mushrooms such as Boletus edulis, sealed at the edges and boiled in borscht-like soups or chorbas. Tradition says they are eaten on the last day of fasting before Christmas Eve. Their name may come from the Turco-Greek börek, since Greek Phanariote dynasties ruled Moldavia for decades. It may instead come from burete, the Romanian word for mushroom, which also meant sponge.

  In Romania, the plăcintă is considered a variation of the phyllo-wrapped pie, traditionally stuffed with cheese. In Dobruja, a territory that was once a Turkish province, plăcintă dobrogeană is filled with cheese or minced meat and served with sheep yoghurt. Dobruja also has the Tatar street food suberek, a deep-fried half-moon of dough with a cheese filling.

  Crimean Tatars, a Turkic people, make their own börek in Crimea. The best known is cheburek, or çiberek. It is a deep-fried turnover of ground or minced meat and onions, made from one round piece of dough folded into a crescent. In the 20th century it became widespread across former Soviet-aligned Eastern Europe, especially Russia, as well as in Turkey and Turkmenistan. The rarer töbörek is the same idea, baked instead of fried.

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• 7. The Sephardic Kitchen

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  Saturday morning is when Sephardic Jews traditionally sit down to bourekas, as part of the Shabbat breakfast meal. The pastry belongs to the Jewish traditions of both Mizrahi and Sephardic communities. Ottoman Jewish communities adopted it, and one description names it, together with boyos de pan and bulemas, as "the trio of preeminent Ottoman Jewish pastries".

  The story of burekas in Sephardic cuisine goes back to the Expulsion of Jews from Spain. A large part of that community then migrated to the Ottoman Empire. The name burekas is the plural of the Balkan original, in the form used in Judaeo-Spanish. It once covered larger pastries, palm-sized or more, while smaller ones were called burekitas. That distinction has faded in Modern Hebrew. Sephardi immigrants from Turkey and the Balkans later brought burekas to Israel during Ottoman rule.

  Today they are sold in bakeries and at dedicated market stalls across Israel. The most popular fillings are salty cheese, mainly feta, spinach, eggplant and mashed potato. Others are mushrooms, sweet potato, chickpeas, olives, mallows, Swiss chard and tomato sauce, a version called "burekas pizza". Meat appears less often because Jewish dietary law prohibits mixing milk and meat. Many burekas, especially those without cheese, use margarine-based dough instead of butter. That makes them parve, so they can join any type of meal.

  People serve burekas as snacks at large gatherings and even office meetings. Grocery stores sell frozen ones to bake or fry at home. Bulemas and boyoz, two related Sephardic pastries, are also popular in the Turkish city of Izmir. Back in North Africa, other cooks gave the pastry yet another shape.

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• 8. Brik and Burēk

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  In Algeria, bourek is a roll of pastry sheet stuffed with meat, onions and spice. It is one of the main appetizers of Algerian cuisine and a starter for receiving guests. It is especially served on Ramadan evenings, alongside Algerian chorba or harira. Other fillings include chicken and onions, shrimp with béchamel sauce, and a vegetarian mix of mashed potatoes and spinach.

  Eastern Algeria, notably the city of Annaba, has a related specialty called brik or brika. It is made from brik leaf stuffed with mashed potatoes and a mixture of minced meat, onions, cheese and parsley. A seasoned raw egg tops it. The egg cooks once the sheet has been folded and soaked in boiling oil.

  Tunisia's brik is a thin, crepe-like pastry around a filling, commonly deep-fried. The best known is the egg brik, a whole egg in a triangular pocket with chopped onion, tuna, harissa and parsley. It is also very popular in Israel because of the large Tunisian Jewish population there. Israeli versions may use a raw egg and herbs, or tuna, harissa and olives, and some cooks serve it in a pita. Another name for it is boreeka. Libya also eats the dish, and there it is known as brik.

  In Saudi Arabia, burēk is usually made in the Hejaz region in the west. It mostly resembles the Bosnian rolled burek, though other variants exist. Cooks stuff it with minced meat, or with salty cheese and dill. It is served during the month of Ramadan, as are samosas.

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