Hi! Today
I would like to introduce you to a concept called börek.
In Turkey, we have over 300 types of different böreks;
crunchy, soft, with multi layers, single layer, baked, fried but all
amazing and around these regions through Balkans to
Egypt to Armenia old up there we have probably over a thousand
different types of böreks and it's really amazing all of
them each different and all amazing. Isn't that amazing, today i would like to
cook with you one of my favorites it's called
çi börek, it's crunchy outside, soft inside and watery inside and it's
great with cheese, great with meat and i'm also going to make a vegan
version of it. So, three types of çi börek with Refika
recipe and i made it so easy so that everyone around the world can
make it in their homes. The name çi börek is pronounced two ways
one is with a soft g chi (çiğ) and the other one is çi.
With the soft g one also means raw cause the meat you put in it is
raw but it's cooked so fast and it gives all the delights
to the pastry, the other one's name çi comes from when it's sizzling on the pan
the sound that it makes resembles the çi; both names add up to
something great. Now, if we're ready, let's start çi börek. First, we're going to prepare the dough for the dough, i need
150 grams of plain flour, half a pack half a tablespoon it also means
of baking powder, teaspoon of salt not a heap tablespoon straight and
a tablespoon of yogurt and finally a tablespoon of butter. This butter is
quite melted because of the lights and now
here is really hot but if it's not melted what you should do
is put it on a pan turn on the pan for 5 seconds or 10 seconds and let it melt
with that heat. If you turn it on and the butter gets
really heated then your flour will meet with hot
butter and it is going to ruin the taste of the flour.
It's going to make it a bit bitter and i also added
one third glass we have in Turkey and we give measures with glasses also for
everyone around world that might be easier one third is about
75 milliliters of water and i add it all in, then i mix it up.
After the dough loses its stickiness, i'm going to put my
hands at work and knead it for about 2-3 minutes.
I have a rather small dough like this but from this we're going to have like
four big böreks like this to do that i'm
going to cut it into four we call that a beze
excuse my english i sometimes forget. I also want to show you
to make this beze in a perfect shape, to make it in a good shape, sometimes
if the dough is not and it's really good form,
it doesn't get formed easily but to do that
you have to really press to make it into a shape.
I'm really now squeezing and the more you squeeze you
wake up the gluten and it makes actually the dough stronger
and then to make it round what you have to do
make your hand a dome and the right one on the side and this gives the round
shape and make it rounder and perfect like this. Also,
when i first began, I wasn't able to do that easily,
i would what i would do is i would first knead it a bit as you can see it
immediately gets stronger and then what i would do i would like
tuck it in and become perfect. For the baking powder to start to work, i'm going to let them sit for like two
three minutes. If it's going to stay longer, you have to cover them with a wet
damp cloth. Here i have 200 grams of ground beef
and to that i'm going to add one and a half
onions and i'm going to grate them. There was a comment
i read this morning lady from London, England, Mercourio.. something like that said that the Europeans don't know grating as to use in the foods like
they don't grate onions or tomatoes, have you read that comment too?
You're leaving great comments and please continue to do so cause
that's like as you know Turkey is not going through good days, the world is not
going through good days and it's the light in our lives so
for thousands of years we're grating in some
sense onions and tomatoes since they came
150 years. A little. Actually not to cry so much, i kind of
cheated; grated one onion beforehand so that i cry less. So this is one and a
half. As you can see it's a lot of water but
this is almost more onions than ground beef
but almost in all the böreks that makes it great
the sugar in the onion turns into a caramelized
incredible taste, it softens the meat as you can see now it's reddish but it's
going to turn into brown and with my clean hand i'm going to add
a pinch of salt, pepper two pinches and that's
almost it; even though as you've seen the onions were really watery,
i'm going to add one fifth of a glass which is about 40 milliliters of
more water. Yeah it's a soaking mix. Now this is
going to get into those four and i'm going to heat up my
oil. Now, i'm going to use olive oil and it has to be around 2 centimeters
in height kind of like deep frying because
it has to take almost half of the pastry in. The most important thing,
it shouldn't be higher than it's burning degrees which is in this case about 200
degrees. For example in Turkey we have hazelnut
oil you can use various kind of oils which you think is
suitable for frying in which your budget is okay with.
Time to make the börek, i get my patty i put it like this.
I put a bit more flour and then i flour my
merdana, rolling pin if you don't have a rolling pin,
you can use a glass like this, the second one i'm going to use this one,
it's a bottle sorry.. Glass bottle. I don't press
on the dough like this, i just go back and forth
and then after a while it becomes an ellipse and i
turn it into 90 degrees and continue. There's no
flour on top, it's going to stick so always more flour and that
now it's like this round shape which is my hands are almost
20 centimeters and rather thin like this. I'm going to fold it, so that i'm going
to put the mince meat around this place,
as you can see because of the onion how the color has changed
from that bright to rather brown but it smells
very delicious even now, because now almost the onion
cook the meat This is Refika's kitchen so
grandma portions work here and they are going to do this for the first time so
i'm not sure i made the half but even though if i didn't
i'm going to like pull it a bit, thanks for the gluten,
and i'm going to press the sides like this. This is really
important because the air that we are going to drag
inside is going to heat up and then it's going to
make the börek a little bigger so after i do that
i put my finger like this and fold a little. So one final check, all here and then
this is going to get onto the oil. Now i'm going to check whether it is hot
and if there are bubbles; yes there are bubbles, it's okay and very
fast once you make it shouldn't sit you have
to put it in and you have to put some oil on top to
literally harden the dough but not too much
because then i would reduce the degrees of the oil.. Now the hardest part is to turn without
ruining the surface so wait for a while until one side is
really cooked and second part will be great. While taking out you also have to be
careful not to ruin any part, now i have this new
belief that when i do something fried, i don't
take it to a paper towel but something with holes when it first
gets out of the fire, if there's a thing that can let the oil
drip but also get the air at the bottom
and first cool down a bit like that then it's always crunchier
but be careful it's now amazingly hot. Normally, i would never use a knife for
this but i wanted to show you the inside very crunchy outside filled with
goodness in the soft dough inside and
and inside the mincemeat smells heavenly the onion
does its miracles. Usually we eat this with ayran again the
one that we did with the rap; dürüm. Thank you i had read a lot of comments
about and i believe in India, they make the different types of ayran
actually better than us but the sour and the plain one in Turkey
is relatively better. So if you ever visit and come from India
don't say like this is what we have in back in
India and don't try, you should definitely try it.. Bahar we're
waiting for you, please come and eat us.. That's even hotter.. Guys i remembered something and i
believe it's very important because like if you're not really a
person of deep frying and i should say i am not because i don't deep fry a lot
it might be a bit dangerous for this like big börek,
so what you can do and i'm going to do the vegetarian like that
is to make the börek rather smaller so like if this is one piece half it like
that and make your böreks from this, it's
going to be easier to handle and if there are more people around so
more people can taste it. Now when it comes to a vegetarian
version of this, we need some kind of cheese; it could be anything that can
easily melt. In Turkey, we use kashar, kashar is a
version of kashkaval or fetta cheese is known in most parts of
the world but we have a slightly different version of it and it's called
beyaz peynir, those would do good but for you, you can
use mozzarella, you can use a light cheddar, not a very
heavy and aged one, even a good light gouda will do so
first grate the cheese like for each portion we need about
40 grams and the opening of the dough is exactly the same
and then edit and fold it and make the size really nice and then fry it and
then eat it immediately but watch out because when
you cut it the cheese is going to melt and elongate and don't hurt
yourself, it's really really amazing. If we make this a vegan one what will
happen now for the first time i'm going to make
a vegan version of it and i really want to do this with you
guys so probably the vegans are now getting really used to, if i replace this
with this one they have an idea but i would like to share this for everyone
so that if someone wants to do it vegan or don't have the
ingredient at home, they can replace it. So for the flour to make it vegan,
we have to replace the yogurt and the butter.
Instead of butter i'm going to use coconut oil and instead of the yogurt
yogurt have two aspects the oil aspect and the
acidity. For the acidity, i'm going to use a
teaspoon of vinegar and for the oil i'm going to increase
the coconut oil slightly so one and a half tablespoons
of oil. the rest of making the dough is same
salt, water, flour, baking powder. For the inside,
because we liked it with the minced meat, i want something which will give the
feeling of a minced meat and that's going to be mushrooms and as we have seen onion made miracles with the minced meat we're
going to add a lot of onions in this case
as well for the meat's different kind of taste
we need a little bit of help for the mushroom to go there and so then
the garlic comes into the picture to save the day.
We toss all these ingredients with a bit of salt and pepper
and a bit of olive oil on the pan before adding it
into the börek but don't forget to cool the
filling before making it into a börek otherwise, it won't be as crunchy as we want. One last thing because i believe it's
really really important is oil is something very precious olive oil
is even more precious. So these frying oils are reusable at
least four to five times, you can use the oil again and again.
First you have to let it cool down and then filter it and
put it on a jar, on a dark and cool place in the kitchen
and every time you use that it's going to be economically better
and plus after the oil is unusable you can
give it to a restaurant or something because they would probably recycle it
some people collect it even in Turkey they do and it would be
some kind of another energy as well. I believe this is really important,
if you weren't doing this before please think about it.
Now here comes the sun. Come and taste it. So this is it..
You can smell the garlic, the onion; it kind of gives the feeling of a samosa
probably because of coconut oil used tastes much lighter and very good..
Also green lentils could have been really nice
maybe one day we do something with the green lentils, hope you like this video
if you liked it please write a comment below. When you
share something nice, it really gives us the wings and also
please press your like and that's how the word travels and people like you
who would enjoy this video would be able to see it. It's been
less than five months in these times your support,
your enthusiasm changed me a lot; there were some scars let's say i was
trying to cover most of the time about life, about
some of the things i do and your enthusiasm heal those scars thanks
so much really really love you and take care..
