Burek (phyllo meat pie)

You can get married now!

While people may debate about ingredients and names, the type of dough used for burek is strictly undebatable. The dough, known as jufka, is thinner than a sheet of paper and notoriously difficult to recreate for the untrained. It requires extreme delicacy, patience, skill, and ample space to work with.

Due to the immense effort involved, girls in the Balkans who successfully present a homemade phyllo pie at the table are traditionally complimented with the phrase, “Now you can get married!”

Don’t wanna get spliced yet? Don’t worry! Store-bought phyllo dough works very well, especially with the tricks in the recipe below!

Traditionally burek is made in a round baking dish (tepsija) under the sač, an iron lid covered with sizzling coals. Nowadays burek comes out of the oven in two shapes: rolled or layered. In Bosnia and Herzegovina burek is sold in specialized bakeries called buregdžinica-s, which besides burek (with meat), also sell pies such as sirinica (white cheese), krompiruša (potatoes), and zeljanica (spinach). Pies with both meat and potato are known as šareni burek. All these different pies are types of pita (BCMS) or pite (Albanian) and are available in different sizes.

Burek with … kidney?!?

Burek, in some form, was introduced to the Balkans by the Ottoman Turks and is a product of Turkish, Persian, Central Asian, and Byzantine/Greek culinary traditions. Not only the dish itself, but also its nomenclature was brought in. In Ottoman (and modern) Turkish the name for similar pies/bites/pastries is بورك (börek), which in turn derived from بوبرك‎ (böbrek), meaning kidney.

An intriguing, though somewhat irrelevant, fun fact is that the latter term was borrowed by Balkan languages as well—BCMS: bubreg/бубрег, Bulgarian – бъ́брек, Macedonian – бубрег.

In addition to the aforementioned countries, variations of this dish are found in Bulgaria (бюрек – byurek) and Greece (μπουρέκι – boureki). These types are however slightly different from the phyllo pies in this recipe.

International family

With its numerous variations, burek is undeniably part of a truly international culinary family. This rich heritage extends far beyond Anatolia and the Balkans, reaching the farthest corners of the former Ottoman Empire. From North Africa (بريك – br’ik, breek), to the Arabian Peninsula ( بُريك – b’re’k), among Jewish (בורקס – bourekas) and Armenian populations (բորեկ – borek). Further cousins include чебурек – cheburek and bierock, snacks from the Tatars and Volga Germans respectively.

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