Burek Recipe: Traditional Sarıyer Burek Pastry

Ingredients

• 500g flour – (hard flour / baklava pastry flour)
• 290ml water – (at room temperature)
• 263g butter or margarine
• 10g salt

for Filling

• 250 g ground beef – (low fat from the brisket)
• 380 g onion – (finely chopped)
• 1 tablespoon of currants
• 1 tablespoon of peanuts
• salt and black pepper

Before Starting Burek Recipe

The dough of the burek recipe is a hand-rolled pastry and you can only roll it out by hand without any additional equipments. Yes, you did not hear wrong, you will open the dough just with your hand easily. The point is that you need to follow this recipe, that the dough must rest very well and the dough is resting with butter for the second time with a process called doubling with butter, and the dough will absorb the fat.

It is a measure that you can apply in most pastry dough preparation for dough and fat ratio. 1/3 of the total weight of the dough should be fat. eg. You can open your dough in the most ideal way with 263 g of oil equivalent of 790 g of dough in this sleeve pastry recipe.

The dough would not need to be kneaded too much, you should let it rest for at least one hour after your dough is recovered, and with this resting, the gluten chains in the flour will be bonded much better, ensuring that it is an elastic dough that opens easily and does not tear too much.

Another detail in the relationship between dough and oil is that the dough and oil have the same softness. For this, kneading and balancing your oil is a necessary step for your dough to open easily.

Doughs that are doubled (adding oil between each pair and closing) and resting in this way are laminated doughs, since they have dough and fat dough layers, the fat between the dough melts and forms crispy layers. You can hear the delicious crunch while cutting after cooking.

Burek Recipe Dough Directions

• Sift the flour on the counter and start kneading it by opening a pool in the middle and adding salt and water to the middle.
• The dough does not require much kneading, then wrap it in stretch film and rest for 1 hour.
• While the dough is resting At this stage, you can prepare the inner mixture of your sleeve pastry.

Directions for Filling

• Caramelize the pulp of the onions that you chopped in a pan with a little oil (extract the juice of the onions with a strainer or by hand). After the onion is cooked, put it in a separate bowl.
• Add the ground beef in the same pot and fry it. Add the caramelized onions, add salt, black pepper and currants and walnuts if you wish, fry them together for 2 minutes and cool in a bowl.

Burek Recipe Dough Directions (Continued)

• Divide the rested dough into 6 equal parts (133 g each), you can also use the weighing of the work. Roll each piece into a meringue, cover them with a clean cloth and rest for 15 minutes.
• Grease your countertop thoroughly with oil.
• At this time, take the room temperature butter or margarine evenly with the dough. Knead the oil a little to be soft and make it into 3 equal balls (it will go between the meringues for coupling)
• For the doubling process, take the two meringues with your hand and open them with an equal thickness of 25 cm. Add the oil ball to the middle part and again by crushing it with your hand (leaving 1cm space around the dough), crush it into equal thickness. Then, cover the other dough on it and press the ends of the dough well. It is important that the oil stays between the dough in two meringues.
• In this process, the most important point is that the oil is evenly and homogeneously spread between the glands.
• Then take a plate and grease it with oil thoroughly. Add each meringue on top of each other of the doughs you are doubling (it is important to grease it with oil to prevent sticking) Then rest for 1.5 more hours by closing the cling film.

Opening Burek Dough Just with Hands (No Additional Equipments)

• Put the dough pairs (working with 1 pair of dough at a time) on the well oiled bench. Lubricate your hands with oil and start to roll the dough by crushing it slowly. After opening 40-50 cm, lift it slightly from one end and stretch it by stretching it with a downward motion. In order to prevent the dough from coming back, after you stretch the stretched part to the counter, tap and stick on it.
• After the dough is completely unfolded, fold the part near you onto the dough and stick it. Stretch the lumpy dough remaining at the ends and stick it to the dough. Small tears may occur in the dough. No problem, these tears will close when rolling.
• Then add a handful of mortar to this section horizontally. Hold the right and left corners of the dough, fold it up to the middle and roll it up.
• Bake at 200 °C for 23 minutes

After your arm pastry is cooked, turn it over and let it cool. In this way, the oil collected at the bottom during cooking will be distributed evenly throughout the pastry while it cools. After your pastry has cooled for 10 minutes, you can cut it and serve. Enjoy!