Fresh cheese pie – BUREK Pie

In Croatia this dish is called ‘Burek’, when you enter any bakery in Croatia, you can choose whether you want it with cheese, meat, spinach … I know that in Bosnia and Herzegovina ‘Burek’ is only with meat and this recipe I bring you today is Pie with cheese or Burek Pie, so here’s the title like this. No matter how you prefer to call it, it’s important that it’s good, very good.

My grandmother comes from Jajce, a little town in Bosnia and Hercegovina. A country where women make this dish almost every day with homemade phyllo pastry and various fillings in side. When I was just five years old my grandmother would teach me how to make this from scratch. She would mix in a dough and then I would pull it all across the table until it was super thin and almost see through. She used to watch me from the middle of the room, sitting on a small stool while drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette, telling me where I should pull more so that the dough it evenly thin.  To me it was fun, to her it was passing her love of cooking on to her granddaughter.

My grandmother died nine years ago and what I have left from her are great and fun memories and tons of great recipes for some of the most amazing dishes. Today I will not tell you how to make your own phyllo pastry, because it requires time and patients to learn the proper technique to stretch the simple dough so thin without breaking it.  I do believe you can buy phyllo pastry now in almost all the super markets.

Enjoy.

Ingredients:

Ingredients for 20 cm (8 inch) diameter cake pan or round mold.

1. 250g of phyllo pastry (9oz)
2.  375 g of fresh cheese (13oz)
3. 1 cup of sour cream
4. 2 eggs
5. 1-2 teaspoons of salt
6. 100 ml + 50 ml mineral water
7. 2 tablespoons oil

Preparation:

1. Grease the mold in which you will bake or cover the mold with a greasy baking paper.
2. Place two phyllo pastry sheets in the mold so that the edges of the sheets are running out over the edges of the mold. Leave one extra sheet on the side.
3. Mix the cheese, sour cream, eggs, salt and 100 ml of mineral water in a bowl. In this add the remaining sheets of phyllo pastry which you previously broken into small pieces.
4. Pour this mixture into the mold. The edges of the lower phyllo sheet that are sticking out fold over a mixture of cheeses.
5. Cover the rest of the mixture with the sheet that you have saved, carefully pull the edges tucking them under the lower sheet.
6. Mix two tablespoons of oil and 50 ml of mineral, pour it over the pie and leave it to rest for 30 minutes.
7. During this time heat the oven to 180°C (356^oF) and bake for about 30-35 minutes, i.e. until browned. Somebody’s going to bake longer, somebody shorter.
8.  Leave the burek/pie to rest for 5-10 minutes before serving. Serve it with yogurt.