Kol Böreği

A swirl of flaky pastry filled with feta, mushrooms and spinach to send you into a happy spiral. # 350: Kol Böreği

Happy 350th post! I’m not sure why multiples of fifty feel like bigger milestones than any other numbers… but yay anyway! Go eat a pastry to celebrate.

There’s this cute bakery in Dubrovnik called Holy Burek which serves these amazingly flaky rich pastries shaped like skinny batons and filled with cheese and other deliciousness. We were only there for a few days and went twice! Twas that good.

This branch of the pastry family is sprawling with tons of cousins that all have slightly similar names and use the same ingredients, but are shaped differently depending on the country that claims it. Each of the versions I’ve found use yufka or phyllo dough as a base (insanely thin pastry sheets that dry out and crack if you look at them the wrong way) and can be filled with any mix of soft cheeses, spinach, meat etc for a savory version and honey, cheese and nuts if you’re leaning more towards a dessert. Kol böreği is a Turkish version that is shaped like a yummy optical illusion.

I went a little rogue and added mushrooms to the filling because the spinach looked lonely.

To get phyllo to play nice, you need to either work at the speed of light or cover the sheets waiting to be used with some version of plastic wrap topped with a damp towel. If the damp towel touches the dough, it’ll glue it to the next few sheets and give up on you entirely, but if you just leave them open to the air, they’ll dry out and crack. They want to be near a damp kitchen towel without ever actually touching it. Truly the Goldilocks of dough.

To get the large spiral, you have to make several rolls of pastry and add on to the swirl until it fills your pan. If the dough was sturdier you could do it all in one go, laying 6 sheets of phyllo dough along the short side slightly overlapping to avoid gaps and then swirling it all in a seamless pattern. But phyllo sees your efficient plans and laughs. Even with at least four sheets layered with butter, it’s still so delicate that it rips when you even consider doing more than two sheets in length at a time.

It reminds me of strudel, with its paper-thin pastry layers painted with butter and rolled into a tube. Another pastry cousin! Imagine the family reunion.