An amazing Turkish variant of strudels made out of yufka dough. Most of the burek you get is quite fat, however you can also make delicious burek without lots of oil.

Ingredients

• 500g yufka dough

Filling:

• 750g frozen spinach
• 500g mixed sheep cheese
• 2 big onions
• 3 garlic cloves

Sauce (optional):

• 3 eggs
• 400ml yoghurt
• 200ml oil
• salt & pepper

Instructions

Thaw the spinach and press out some of the water. I reduced the 750g to 500g doing so. Cut the onions and brown them in butter or oil. Crush the sheep cheese with your hands and mix all ingredients together.For the sauce, mix all ingredients together.

Yufka dough is quite dry. If you make the variant without sauce you have to dip the yufka sheets in water before using them!

Forming (Easy Method)

Oil a baking from and place your first layer of yufka in it. Do not cut any of the surplus dough away as you can use that to cover up the top later on. Afterward, add your first layer of filling. Other than the first dough layer the next one should not be placed in flat, but tangled. If you go with the sauce variant, add some onto the dough. Repeat the process until you reach the top part. Use the surplus dough of the first layer to cover up the top and add your last layer of yufka (flat) on top. Cover the top with sauce or with some egg. If you have some, add some nigella or black sesame seeds.

No Sauce

The version without sauce is lighter, but has less flavor (no eggs). For this variant you need to dip each sheet in water before placing them!

With Sauce

For this version you should not put the first and last layer of yufka in water. As we used quite a lot of sauce, this version was a bit too wet and would have been better with more dough in between. Potentially you can skip putting the dough in water completely.

Forming II

The second method of forming burek is a bit tricky to get right the first (few) times if you have no idea what you are doing.

Get a wet kitchen towel (really wet!) and lay out two sheets of yufka dough, slightly overlapping each other. Spread a few table spoons of the egg sauce on top of it and spread it with a brush. Do also cover the part between the two dough sheets. Place your filling in a line at one side, I generally use the side near me. There are two main factors that will make your life better (or hell) in the next steps that you can mess up here.

• A) Do use just a little bit of filling. The picture actually shows too much filling, I reduced it for the next ones by at least 1/3!
• B) Do use even less filling for the first 10-15 cm (either the left or right).

Overlap your filling with the outer dough. Try to get it somewhat in shape, but do not over do it. Take the two ends of the towel and lift them up. This will roll your burek without ripping up the dough.

Now to the hard part. Start curling the burek, starting from the side where you placed less filling. The first half is the most tricky one. Once done, I stop and bring the second half in rather than going full way from left to right. The picture below shows my trials and errors for this process. The upper left one had too much filling inside (problem A). For the upper left one I doubled the jufka sheets, so the dough would not rip up. This however was also quite a failure, especially on the inner part (problem B). For the next two I only used one jufka layer again, but applied the two rules stated above. The results are clearly visible.

Note: as the first ones ripped open pretty badly the towel was super messy. As you top the burek off with some leftover egg sauce anyhow, this does not matter at all. Just use it until you are done.

Baking

Bake the burek for 30 minutes at 200 degrees until gold brown. The sauce version did grow a bit, while the non sauce version was super crispy.

Tips

Yufka dough dries out very quickly. Once opened, cover it with a wet kitchen towel.

Use a bit less sauce the next time.