Burek Recipe!

Here we go. I'll be essentially following this blog. Problem is, it's in Serbian. So...

I'll explain the dough first, and talk about the insides later.

Ingredients for dough:

4 cups of white flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 and 1/4 cups of water

7 tablespoons of butter

7 tablespoons oil (just under a half cup)

1. Mix flour, salt and water (NOT the oil or butter) together. It should make a smooth dough, and shouldn't be a gooey mess. It should look something like this:

2. Split into five equally sized pieces.

3. Roll each piece to about the size of a CD, as below.

4. In a flat dish (a pie pan works great), mix the oil and melted butter.

5. Submerse the pieces of dough into the oil mixture one at a time. Make sure all sides are covered. Use a spoon to pour more stuff on top if you have to. It'll look kind of like a tower of pancakes, with oil instead of syrup. Make sure the top one is covered as well.

6. Wait for 30 minutes. You may have to spoon a bit more oil on the top one. Also, this is a good time to prepare the filling.

7. On a well oiled, fairly big table, put the first piece of dough. Spread it out a bit at first by smooshing it down.

8. Pull on the sides around and around the edge till it is as big as you can make it without it tearing. You should be able to see through it.

9. Put about a fourth of the fillings (more on what these are in a bit) in the middle of the spread out dough, spread out. We put them too close together and so our burek was too thick to cook through. It won't ruin it though. Maybe the size of the top of a pie pan? Perhaps a rectangular shape for them would be best since we're going to have to cook it in a 9x13 pan.

10. Fold the dough over the fillings till it is covered.

11. Put that one aside, and spread out another piece of dough.

12. Put the last piece we made in the middle, put a fourth of the toppings on top of THAT, then fold it together again. You are making layers of dough and filling this way.

13. Repeat for the rest of the dough and filling. For the fifth piece of dough, you don't add any filling.

14. Put the burek into an ungreased 9x13 pan. Cook at 400 degrees (Fahrenheit) for 35-40 minutes. It should be a delicious golden brown.

Notice how thin theirs is compared to ours. This is what I meant by spreading it out. If it's thick, don't worry, it'll still taste pretty good!

Traditionally you cut it into slices like pizza and just pick it up and eat it. No utensils required! You're also supposed to wash it down with a nice lukewarm glass of thin plain yogurt, but... that's a bit of an acquired taste. Milk will do just fine.

Now, for the fillings. Pretty much you can use anything. The two most traditional is either "young" cheese, like Feta, or a pork filling. For Feta, just use about 400-500 grams (about a pound) of it. For pork, we cooked 400 grams of ground pork, broke into small pieces, added half a medium onion, 2 cloves of garlic and some salt and pepper. You could do it with hamburger too. Or pretty much anything you can put into a pie. Sour cherry and apple are pretty good.

And that, my friends, is burek! Prijatno!