Bosnian cuisine
Bosnian burek
Burek
A spiral of hand-stretched pastry with a meat filling. In Bosnia only the meat one is called burek.
- Prep
- 75 min
- Cook
- 45 min
- Total
- 120 min
- Difficulty
- Takes practice
Ingredients
- Flour500 g
- Warm water280 ml
- Minced beef600 g
- Onions — finely chopped2
- Vegetable oil150 ml
- Vinegar1 tsp
- Yoghurt — to serve400 ml
- Salt and pepperto taste
Salt and spices grow more slowly than the rest: doubling a dish does not double the pepper.
Weight converts to ounces and volume to cups. Grams of flour are not turned into cups, because that depends on how tightly it is packed.
Method
- 1
Knead a dough from the flour, warm water, a spoon of oil, the vinegar and salt, and work it fifteen minutes until elastic.
18 min
- 2
Divide it into four balls, oil them, cover and leave them forty minutes.
45 min
- 3
Mix the raw mince with the onion, salt, pepper and two spoons of water; the water keeps the filling from drying out.
8 min
- 4
Stretch a ball by hand on a cloth-covered table into a translucent sheet, working from the centre outwards.
20 min
- 5
Sprinkle the sheet with oil, lay the filling in a line along one edge and roll it into a long thin cylinder.
12 min
- 6
Coil the cylinders into a round tin from the centre outwards, brush with oil and bake at 200 °C for forty minutes.
45 min
- 7
Sprinkle the hot burek with water and cover it with a cloth for five minutes to soften the crust. Serve with yoghurt.
8 min
About the dish
The dough is stretched by hand across a big table until it is translucent — thin enough to read newsprint through. A rolling pin is useless at that stage.
The mince goes in raw. It cooks inside the pastry in its own juices, and pre-fried mince gives a dry crumb.
The names are strict: with meat it is burek, with cheese sirnica, with spinach zeljanica, with potato krompiruša. Asking for "cheese burek" in Sarajevo makes no sense.
Worth knowing
- — The vinegar relaxes the gluten so the sheet stretches without tearing. Without it the dough splits in the middle of the table.
- — Patch holes with scraps from the edges, which get trimmed anyway. Nobody's first sheet comes out whole.
- — The mince has to be fatty, twenty per cent at least. Lean mince gives a dry filling however much water you add.
Nutrition
Per serving at the base yield, calculated from the ingredients rather than measured in a lab.
- Calories
- 690 kcal
- Protein
- 30 g
- Fat
- 38 g
- Carbs
- 58 g
More from Bosnia and Herzegovina
- Bosanski lonac — Meat and vegetables layered in a clay pot and cooked four hours without stirring.