I learned how to cook this dish in Aramaic cuisine; in fact, it belongs to Turkish cuisine. It cooks quickly, the taste depends on the type of cheese you use. We prepare it from GAZI sheep cheese aged in brine. Unfortunately, I don’t know which types of Russian cheese are more suitable for this dish; it is important that it is a soft cheese made from brine without a crust. Try the cheese first; if it is very salty, it is better to soak it in water for several hours to remove excess saltiness. I’ve already made it with Russian cottage cheese; of course, it needs to be salted to taste or made sweet with sugar. I hope that in Russia there are yufka sheets on sale, I buy them immediately cut into triangles, there are 25 pieces in one pack, you can, of course, buy round ones and cut them.
I take the following products:
Let's prepare the filling: crumble the cheese with your hands or a fork, add chopped parsley (optional).
We take the sheets out of the package one at a time, as the dough dries quickly and breaks. Place one tablespoon of filling on a sheet of yufka.
We bend the bottom edge and corners, it is important that the filling does not leak out during frying.
Lubricate the tip with water so it sticks to the dough.
It turns out this is a cigar.
We are preparing all the remaining cigars.
Heat the oil and fry the cigars on one side.
And on the other side until golden brown. They fry very quickly!
Place on a napkin to remove excess fat. Can also be baked in the oven.
Eat simply with yogurt or with or with any other. Also delicious with vegetable salad. Serve immediately while the crust is crisp and the cheese is melted.
Bon appetit!
Step 1: Cut the pita bread.
Remove the pita bread from the packaging and place it on a cutting board. Lavash should be fresh - it should not break or crack. Cut the pita bread like a cake into 6 large triangles.Step 2: Prepare the filling.
Take a deep bowl. Rub into it cheese on a fine grater and add 1 egg yolk. Stir the resulting mass. Afterwards, rinse a bunch of fresh dill and chop it finely. add finely chopped dill and ground black pepper to the bowl with cheese and yolk, mix again. Step 3: Wrap the filling.
Place the chopped pita bread again on the cutting board and begin to lay out the filling. The filling must be placed on the rounded edge of the pita bread. For better gluing, coat the edges of the pita bread with protein, then our tubes will not “open up”. We twist the tubes towards the sharp corner of the pita triangle. Step 4: Fry the tubes.
Place a frying pan on the stove and pour a small amount of oil. We wait until the frying pan warms up and then place the rolled-up lavash tubes on the frying pan. Fry Belek cigars over high heat for 5-10 minutes. After frying, you need to blot the tubes with a paper towel or napkin to remove excess oil. Step 5: Serve Berek cigars.
Place hot Belek cigars on plates, garnishing the dish with fresh vegetables, lettuce and olives. The dish turns out very tender and crispy. Your loved ones and guests will definitely like it. Bon appetit! Belek cigars can be consumed both warm and cold.
Thanks to the salty cheese, this dish is ideal as a beer snack.
If you want a more dietary version of this dish, cook Belek cigars in the oven. To do this, preheat the oven to 180 degrees and bake until crispy.
If you have too little cheese at home and you don’t have enough to prepare this dish, take cottage cheese of any fat content and add it to the cheese.
If desired, you can add garlic passed through a press to the filling.
Friends, I would like to present to you a recipe for crispy “Sigara börek” tubes made from thin and tender phyllo dough. This pastry is national.
Crispy rolls of cheese are traditionally made from the finest filo dough. In its homeland it is called “Sigara börek”, which are similar in shape to Cuban cigars, which is where the name itself comes from!
Filo dough can be purchased ready-made in large supermarkets. However, the price is not very cheap, so it is absolutely not economical to buy. You can prepare it at home yourself, but you need to be prepared for a labor-intensive process:
- first the dough is kneaded;
- then roll it out with a rolling pin;
- and at the end - they pull it out with their hands.
The most difficult task is to stretch it with your hands until it is as thick as tissue paper. But with the advent of experience, this problem gradually disappears.
I told you a detailed recipe on how to make phyllo dough earlier, you can watch it.
If you find it difficult to prepare, then use a store-bought equivalent. Also, some housewives simplify their work to a minimum and prepare a hot appetizer using regular puff pastry instead of dough. These crispy little pies cook quickly and disappear from the table in a flash.
Real Turkish “Börek Cigars”, rolled into tubes, usually have a diameter of no more than 2 cm. They are prepared with feta cheese, salted cottage cheese or meat. The latter are less popular, but you can try. But you don’t have to stop at these fillings! If you want to conduct culinary experiments, use for tender crispy rolls: cheese mass, fruits, vegetables, cheese, etc. This will no longer be the Turkish “Cigar Börek”, but still a tasty and original snack.
Let's see how to cook “Cigar börek”; for your convenience, I have prepared the recipe with step-by-step photos.
Filo dough – 200 g
Cheese cheese (or cottage cheese) – 200 g
Salt - a pinch
Eggs – 1 pc. for filling, 1 pc. for lubricating tubes
Cooking "Cigar börek"
1. Break the cheese and crumble it by mashing it with a fork (you can use a blender). If you have cottage cheese, mash it with a fork.
2. Add a raw egg and a pinch of salt to the crushed product. Do not overdo it with salt: if you have cheese, it is already salty and you may not need salt at all.
3. Mix the mass until it becomes homogeneous.
4. Next, let's start with the phyllo dough. In supermarkets it is sold already rolled out, so you just have to defrost it. If you decide to cook it yourself, first roll it out as thinly as possible with a rolling pin, being careful not to tear it. Then place it on the back of your palms and gently stretch it as thinly as possible. The stretched phyllo dough is considered ready when, when placed on a newspaper, the letters are visible through it.
Note: to prepare phyllo dough, combine wheat flour (220 grams), boiled water (150 ml), citric acid (1 tsp), vegetable oil (1 tbsp) and salt (pinch). Mix everything and stretch.
5. Cut the rolled out dough into sheets approximately 20 cm long, 15-18 cm wide and place the curd or cheese filling on it.
6. Fold in the edges and roll the dough into a roll to form a tube 2 cm wide.
7. Place the tubes on a baking tray.
8. Beat the egg with a fork and brush the tubes with a pastry brush so that they have an appetizing golden crust.
9. Heat the oven to 180 degrees and bake the products for 20-25 minutes.
10. Crispy and golden brown tubes can be consumed both warm and chilled. They are convenient to take with you on the road or give to children at school. And in Turkey it is customary to serve them for breakfast in the morning.
Bon appetit!
Video recipe “Cigar börek”
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Today we will learn how to cook Turkish bureks. You will find a recipe with meat or minced meat in this article. We will also provide detailed instructions for preparing other types of bureks. After all, there are countless variations of this. It doesn’t even always look like a pie made from a snake-rolled dough sausage with filling. There is also a cigar-burek. This Turkish dish is often compared to Italian lasagna. The most difficult thing in making burek (it would be more correct to call the pie börek) is the dough. It's called "yufka". For some types of börek, filo dough is used. Since they are all very labor-intensive, Turkish housewives do not bother themselves much and buy the base for pies in stores. But sometimes they prepare the dough for börek themselves. We will tell you how to make a yufka. And for the lazy, we’ll reveal a secret: the dough can be replaced with thin Armenian lavash. But it is suitable only for some types of börek. For other varieties, you can use ready-made puff pastry.
Yufka
Let's start, of course, with the base, the dough, which forms the burek. The traditional Turkish recipe suggests preparing yufka from two glasses of flour, one hundred milliliters of water, two eggs, salt and a small amount of butter (you can spread it), which must first be melted. You need to be patient. Sift the flour into a deep bowl and make a depression at the top of the mound. Beat eggs in there, add water and salt. Add half a spoon of oil. Knead the dough thoroughly, sprinkle with flour and let stand for a quarter of an hour. Then roll it out into a layer two centimeters thick. Grease with 3 tablespoons of oil. We cut the layer into three parts, stack them on top of each other and roll out again. Grease again with 3 tablespoons of oil. Again, cut into three parts, which we stack one on top of the other. Knead for a few minutes and form into balls the size of a tennis ball. Roll out each one very thinly to make a circle sixty centimeters in diameter. Now you need to let the yufka dry a little.
Su börek
There is a type of dish that is very reminiscent of lasagna. It is called “water burek”. The Turkish recipe suggests making the dough for it according to the principle of lasagna. To do this, add four eggs and half a glass of salted water to 640 grams of sifted flour. Knead the elastic smooth dough, adding vegetable oil. We divide it into several parts. One of them must be larger than the others. Let the dough rest for half an hour under a towel. We roll out all the parts into very thin layers. Place the largest one in a mold greased with vegetable oil. The edges of the dough should extend significantly beyond the edges of this baking sheet or frying pan. Boil salted water in a saucepan and boil each layer for a minute. Dry on a towel. Due to the cooking process, such a dish, regardless of its filling, is called water börek.
Forming the cake
For example, let's make the simplest filling. Mash four hundred grams of Turkish cheese with a bunch of finely chopped parsley. If the cottage cheese is very dry, you can add a little natural yogurt. Now we form our burek with cheese and herbs. The culinary recipe instructs to grease a large sheet of dough (which is not boiled and is already covered in vegetable oil. We put half of the smaller layers on it. We also coat each with oil. We put half of the filling. We level it, sprinkle with oil. We place the remaining boiled layers of dough on top. We transfer each one with filling and grease with oil. Pick up the hanging edges of the large bottom layer, throwing them up. Grease the product with egg yolk and vegetable oil. Bake until golden brown over moderate heat.
Cigar-burek (Turkish dish): step-by-step recipe
The dish owes its name to its shape. This is not a pie, but tortillas rolled into the shape of a Cuban cigar. They are served as a snack with beer in Turkish bars. The classic filling for “cigars” is feta cheese with dill. This Turkish burek recipe suggests preparing it from stretched phyllo dough. But we will replace it with ready-made Armenian lavash. Let's prepare the filling. Mash cheese or 450 grams of salted cottage cheese with a fork. Add three yolks, a finely chopped bunch of dill, a clove or two chopped garlic. Beat the whites. Cut the pita bread into squares about ten centimeters long. Place a spoonful of filling on the edge of each piece. Roll up the “cigar”. Wet the outside of the square with whipped egg white so that the dough does not unfold. Heat vegetable oil in a frying pan and fry the cigars until golden brown. Place on napkins to drain the oil.
Börek with spinach
The cigars are, of course, very original. But tourists who visited Turkey remembered more the snail-shaped pie. Having two layers of yufka, it is very easy to prepare such a burek at home. The Turkish recipe allows you to make this dish with a variety of fillings. The most popular are potato and spinach pies. Let's prepare the last variety. The filling is super easy to prepare. We chop four hundred grams of spinach and a large onion. Salt and season with black and red pepper to taste. grease with vegetable oil. Turn on the oven at 180°C. In a separate bowl, mix half a glass of water with four tablespoons of vegetable oil. This is necessary to soak the dough. Cut the yufka layer in half. Lubricate each part with impregnation. Place the filling around the edge. Roll the dough into a roll. Place it in a snail-shaped baking dish. We do the same with the second half. We fasten both parts using impregnation. Beat the yolk into the remaining oil water. Lubricate the top of the product with the mixture. If desired, you can sprinkle with seeds (cumin, sesame). Bake for about forty minutes.
Turkish bureki: recipe with meat
This dish can be made either in the form of a snail or as a covered pie. There is another option for the lazy: filling in pita bread. Knowing how to prepare yufka or having filo on hand (in Austria for strudel is called blatterteig), you might think that this Turkish dish is easy to prepare. The Muslim country's recipe for burek recommends making it from ground beef. Pork, firstly, is not halal, and secondly, it gives a lot of juice. But we don’t need it in a pie. First, heat two tablespoons of crushed walnut kernels in a dry frying pan. Let's put them on a plate. Then add oil and fry a finely chopped large onion. Add half a kilo of minced meat. Salt and pepper. Bring until the liquid is cooked and evaporated. Add a small bunch of parsley. Fry for another two minutes and stir in the nuts. Now we prepare the filling. Mix half a glass of natural yogurt and water, an egg and 70 ml of vegetable oil. Grease the mold with vegetable oil. Take three layers of yufka. Using a brush, lubricate them with filling. Place the layer in the mold. Sprinkle the filling on top. We add another layer. And again the filling. There should be dough on top. Break the egg into the remaining yogurt and grease the product. Place in a preheated oven. The burek will swell at first, but then settle.
Another way to shape a pie
You can do things differently with the yufka. Place three layers of dough at once into a greased baking dish. Naturally, they all must be well coated with filling. Place a third of the filling in the center. Cover it with the edges of the top layer. Then we lay out another third. Cover again with a middle layer of dough. Once again the filling and on top - the edges of the lower layer. Brush with a mixture of egg and yogurt. Let's bake.
With Chiken
Many people like classic Turkish burekas rolled with a snail. The chicken recipe allows you to give the pie this shape. This meat is somewhat dry, and the tubes will not spread. Prepare the filling from boiled chicken and parsley. Cut the puff pastry into long narrow strips. Place the filling in the middle. We pinch the dough. We roll the sausages into a snail shape in a baking dish lined with baking paper. The oven should be well heated to two hundred degrees. Bake for about half an hour. Turn off the oven and place a few small pieces of butter on the snail.
Filling recipes
What they don’t put in bereks! And spinach (both solo and with boiled chopped eggs), and minced meat, and leeks, and potatoes. As for the shape of the pie, here too we see variety. There is pouf-berek - crescent-shaped pies. They also prepare small portioned snails, “cigars”, and “pizzas”. But the classic Turkish burek with cheese remains popular among tourists. The recipe for its filling is simple. Mix the cheese with chopped herbs (dill, parsley). What do you think of this filling recipe? Mix equally white and yellow cheeses (feta and, for example, Dutch) - two hundred grams each. Add finely chopped dill and green onions. Squeeze two cloves of garlic. To make the mass a little viscous, add sour cream or yogurt.
