Water Boils: Demystifying Brown Bagging

I made two meals for tomorrow, because I had so many leftovers from the weekend. This is a good excuse to work late and stay in campus until after dinner time. We see some borek, apple slices and almond butter for some protein. As usual, this should cost around 2 dollars. Everything is organic, well except the plastic.

When one needs to make some borek, it is almost impossible to find no. 10 phyllo, the thick kind, in small town USA. Of course you can use no. 2 phyllo, the common variety available in most supermarkets, but it doesn’t fit the purpose as finely. I guess this is my vulgar cultural bias, but I don’t like borek made with thin phyllo. In fact, Turks never use this type of phyllo at home, except for making baklava. And other than grandmas of the rare kind, no-one bothers to make baklava at home anymore. As a result, you cannot even find this product in supermarkets. You have to go to an old fashioned phyllo store, a phylloist I would call. Crazy as it is, we still have artisan shops that exclusively sell phyllo and kadayif, albeit decreasing in numbers. The one in our street corner would work through the night most weekends; and I would see his lights sometimes, coming home late at night, from a leisurely night of drinking and eating at the meyhane. I would feel embarrassed, concerned that if he sees me he will think lowly of me. The guy is working his ass off for my Sunday brunch borek while I am doing what? “Growing my ass” the Turkish idiom would state. The phylloist does overtime because some borek needs to be made. In Turkey, the issue of borek cannot be taken lightly. It is so central to the cousines of Turkey that, there are at least two dozen varieties, categorized by their ethnic affiliations, fillers, or the way the pastry is shaped.

For example, there is Kurdish borek which has said to originate from kombe, or possibly katmer which literally means layered. This is a south-eastern Turkish specialty but occasionally is seen in central regions as well. Since anything related to Kurdish (or any ethnic minority) culture has been taboo until very recently, it is hard to find any records on the etymology of the Kurdish borek and how it relates to the boreks of the region; but this guy claims to be the inventor of the concept. The article is in Turkish, but in summary this person got the rights of the name “Kurdish Borek” in Austria, and is complaining that he cannot do the same back home because of century long anti-Kurdish position of the state. See, like all ethno-political issues, even a piece of borek creates such controversy in my dear home country. You can write a full-on doctoral dissertation deconstructing the discourse around the issue, and I guarantee that you will lose your mind while doing it. For example, since no-one knows it with that name in Diyarbakir (a predominantly Kurdish city), some people claim that it has no roots in Kurdish culinary history, and hence is a misnomer. Oh, yes dear, there are similar types of food in the south, not known as “Kurdish borek”, but as katmer (qetmer in Kurdish); a version far superior than its impostor nouveau-Istanbul-Kurdish borek. Turks make it, Arabs make it, Zazas make it; in fact everyone in the region makes their own version of it.

Unlike katmer, which usually has clotted cream in it, the Kurdish borek has no fillers, just layers of pastry served with confectioners sugar atop. You cannot find it in the most casual of restaurants, because it is traditionally sold at street corners. It is the poor mans borek, just a step up from white rice with chickpeas, and the whorehouse fritters (another item that probably deserves a blog entry due to its name), again sold at street corners. For the majority of white-Turks -the popular moniker for the upper middle class secular population- the word Kurd bears meanings that resemble the ways “ghetto” is used in US. Naturally, an empty borek, an archaic form of food, deserves such a name in the eyes of the dominating elite. I bet most my friends from the private high school I graduated from would see the name fit, not historically or etymologically, but normatively, pertaining cultural inferiority. Things get even more complicated when we want to hear the take of the nationalist right. I’d rather not, but they speak anyway. For example, the Turkists would go in the opposite way and deny the existence of a concept like Kurdish borek. They’d rather die than use the word Kurdish, even the case is describing a piece of pastry. For them, there is no Kurdish borek, just “plain borek”. “How can it be?” as some radical nationalist in Eksi Sozluk (Turkey’s collaborative hypertext dictionary, encyclopedia and a fertile breeding ground for never-ending flame wars) would say: “Kurds have no culture, even their language is an ersatz one”

And then there is Laz borek, a specialty of the Laz people of the Black Sea. This is a sweet one as well, similar to the katmer, but this time, it is filled with custard. Like my obsession with custard donuts, I have a soft spot for this and I would marry any man, woman, drag king, drag queen, grandma, or perhaps a Republican (only if the borek is really good) if he/she/zhe would make some for me. Tatar borek, Bosnian borek and Albanian borek have their own intricacies (see I am getting too lazy to write the details), but perhaps the most ingenious ethnic labeling of borek is the Chinese borek, which entered the Turkish culinary lexicon in the early 90s. You guessed it, this is plain old egg roll. Name calling of boreks is a crazy game, it is as if all neighborhoods would like to have their own borek. Take for example, Sariyer borek and Karakoy borek, which get their names from respective districts in Istanbul where they are predominantly made and sold.

Categorization through fillings is equally complicated. The traditional ones are spinach, meat, cheese, and potato. The Aegeans like theirs with courgette, purslane, eggplant and lor (Turkish ricotta) while the central Anatolians who suffer hardy winters are partial to ones with dry goods: lentil-poppyseed and chickpea are favorites. In Thrace, people buffer their raki with pachanga borek made with pastrami and kasseri cheese. Nice pairing, a sommelier would say. Finally, there is the confusing su boregi, or the “water” borek, the most labor intensive of all kinds. No, it doesn’t have water as a filling; that would be silly, honey. See, the water is involved in the making. The pastry is rolled by hand, then sheets of pastry are parboiled before assembling the whole thing and baking it in the oven.

If this wasn’t enough categorization, perhaps you can define boreks by their shape. A kol (arm, branch) borek is shaped like a long thin log; a cigarette borek, as you might guess, is shaped like a cigar; rose borek is a round cinnamon roll type rollup; and talisman borek has a small triangular form. Then there is puf borek, which is a distant cousin of samosas and empanadas. When fried, it puffs up. Hence the name.

Borek, alongside with comparably labor intensive dolma, is a sign of traditional domesticity, care, hospitality and culinary competence. A good mom is the one who makes borek, as often as she could. A good host will serve borek to her quests with afternoon tea. Even my mom, who barely cooks anything edible, had made boreks once every other weekend when I was a kid. And she made them well. Because in reality, borek is not that hard to make unless you roll the pastry by hand. But it has the aura, a mystery that most comfort foods share. Like the matzo ball soup, the baked ziti and the dumpling, the borek becomes the metric of the good motherhood. In fact, the best moms are known to make their phyllos by hand; store brought phyllos are for “modern” and corrupted wifes. But I am neither a mom, nor a wife and rather corrupted; so I’d prefer get my hands on some phyllo dough and save time.

As I mentioned before digressing into the socio-politics of borek, the conventional store bought phyllo is unfit for my idea of comfort food. You need to add lots of fat to make it flaky, or else it gets brittle outside and sticky inside. Unlike spanakopita, which consists of a thick layer of spinach sandwiched between oily clusters of phyllo, traditional borek is multi-layered, akin to a sauceless lasagna. One layer phyllo is spread, one layer filling goes in; there is much more balance and stability. So if you wanted to use no. 2 phyllo, you need to use at least 2-3 layers stuck on top of each other, and provide some structure for the weight of the filling.

But there are alternatives. During my first week in the US a friend (then my newly made, later my best) started telling me about how one could make borek using flour tortillas. She was particularly excited about the fact that it tastes like rustic homemade borek; one that you make by rolling your own pastry; one that we never tasted at home since both our moms would never imagine rolling one. Yes, we talked about borek before most other things that you need to talk about when making friends; this is how things were between us. For the following years, we kept doing this, and gave each other 20 pounds of body fat as gifts.

Through my first year in grad school, I made a couple of dozen trays of borek for friends, visitors and classmates. It was my potluck dish. I used flour tortillas, they surprisingly tasted authentic to my clueless friends. Those who didn’t find it authentic had nothing better to eat anyway, they were too lazy to cook their own borek. No-one complained, no-one knew, or no-one attempted to make one better. I occasionally found my way into Devon Avenue and got the thick phyllo, but that was rare. When bored, I switched to thin phyllo, but always came back to a bag of good old Aztecs.

My interest wore off after a year, until the great borek backlash of this weekend, when I came home having no idea what to do with big bunch of kale. I was bored with kale, yet I kept buying it every week. Even the cashier recognized my patterns, he started recommending recipes. I didn’t want to make soup, I didn’t want to sautee it, and I definitely didn’t want to try that raw kale salad that the anemic cashier at Wholefoods kept talking about. “I am going to make whole wheat borek appropriate for my volatile insulin levels”, I wrote to one of my friends. “This time, I will use whole wheat tortillas”. And I did. It was my borek. I could name it.

Sabetaic Greko-Turk’s supposed spinach borek (wholesome diaspora remix)

Software

• 6 whole wheat flour tortillas (of course dear, you can make it with white tortillas but then please take the “wholesome” out of the name)
• 1/2 cup of feta (pick one: Bulgarian, Turkish, Greek, Serbian, Israeli, Persian, Romanian or even “fake” Danish feta)
• 1 bunch of kale (or any other green leafy vegetable)
• half a small onion
• 1 egg
• 1 cup milk
• 2 tablespoons of yogurt (Optional. Most people don’t use this, but it helps with the golden color.)
• 1/4 cup olive oil, and some more for sauteeing (like butter? fine)
• red pepper flakes, salt, pepper

Hardware

• an oven proof casserole or a tray and other standard stuff

This makes one rustic borek. The end product is heftier and thicker than the way it is usually made in most households, if you want, you can adjust the recipe using 4 tortillas, but this is the way I like it. It serves four-five normal people or a single person suffering borek withdrawal.

Heat the oven at 400 degrees. Wash the kale, cut the leaves away from the veiny central stalk. Throw away the stalks. Chop chop chop. Chop the onions as well. Sautee onions until translucent and then add kale. Cook 10-15 minutes until the kale becomes very dark and loses most of its moisture. Season with red pepper, salt and pepper. Set aside to cool.

Mix egg, milk, oil and yogurt well into a thick liquid.

Put one tortilla in the greased tray/casserole. Wet the tortilla generously with the milk mixture (3 of tablespoons at least). Layer 1/5 of the cold kale mixture, sprinkle 1/5 of the feta. Spread a little bit more of the milk mixture. You need to ration your mixture here, you will do this five more times. Put another tortilla on top of this, repeat until you run out of tortillas. Spread the last of the egg mixture on top and the sides, ensuring all periphers of tortillas touch and stick to each other. Bake for about 15-20 minutes or until the top gets golden. Let it sit for at least 10 minutes, so that you don’t burn your esophagus. Slice like a pizza, or cut into squares and enjoy! I would say fresh orange juice or lemonade will be perfect with this.