A Bosnian Serb's Meat Pie

Thank you Sanja Bukarac, my dentil hygenist, for teaching me how to make this wonderful dish from Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Thank you Margaret Owen for making meat pie look as beautiful in this painting as it is delicious. And thank you Matt Boutet for the photos that will help you see how exactly to make this dish at home. Click at right for the recipe, story, photos and more of Margaret's beautiful paintings.

painting: Margaret Owen

Meat Pie in Art

I recently visited the studio of the fine artist Margaret Owen in Rhode Island. Her project, Permanent Magenta, is an inspiration for creative people everywhere. She posts a new painting on her blog every day. She also has a painting gallery on Etsy. I love her work as much as I love cooking with immigrants. I wondered how she might interpret meat pie, so I asked. She answered.

Paintings by permission: Margaret Owen

See How To Do It

A Bosnian Serb's Meat Pie

burek

Photos: Matt Boutet

The Recipe

A Bosnian-Serb's Meat Pie with Kefir

Burek

As Sanja Bukarac, from Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, taught Lindsay Sterling in Portland, Maine, February 2012.

Serves 9

Cooking Time: 1:15

1 package phyllo dough

1 Tbsp vegetable oil

2 pounds ground meat (she used beef, veal and pork)

2 eggs

1 cup plain Greek yogurt

2 bunches scallions, sliced into rounds

salt

pepper

bottle of plain kefir

sour cream (optional)

1. One day before cooking transfer phyllo from the freezer to the fridge. One hour before cooking, transfer phyllo box to the counter. Leave it all wrapped up; you don't want the filo to dry out.

2. In a large saute pan with a little oil, saute ground meat with scallions until the meat loses all raw pink spots and is evenly brown. I didn't see her drain the meat of liquified fat, but I had a lot so I drained it off. Season with salt and pepper. In a separate container whisk together the eggs and yogurt. Grease a rectangular baking dish with spray cooking oil. Preheat oven to 385.

3. On a large cutting board or tray, lay out 2 sheets of filo on top of one another with the long side of the rectangle facing you. Spoon ground beef onto the phyllo dough in the shape of a line about an inch thick parallel to the long edge closest to you, leaving an inch of phyllo on each end meatless. Use about 1/2 cup ground beef mixture to make the line. Drizzle yogurt mixture over the top. Roll the phyllo over the meat and keep rolling so you have a long cylander of meat rolled in phyllo. Be quick and confident when working with phyllo, and use as few touches as possible to do what you need to do. For example, just leave the roll you just did where it finished rolling as opposed to moving it somewhere. The more you touch phyllo, the more it falls apart. Cover it with a clean kitchen towel if you need to step away for a minute - otherwise it dries and breaks easily. Make 2 more of meat-in-phyllo rolls.

4. Now put another two sheets of phyllo down, this time off-setting them by 3 inches vertically to give you a little more surface area to roll the three meat rolls you just made inside these sheets of phyllo. Before you roll them up, spoon yogurt mixture in a zig zag pattern across all three rolls. Once they're bundled in the phyllo, transfer this "roll of rolls" into the baking dish, seam side down. Repeat this step two more times, fitting rolls flush against each other in the baking dish.

5. Spray the top of the meat pie with cooking oil and bake until golden and crispy, about 45 minutes. Cover with a clean kitchen towel for ten minutes to help the interior be soft.

Slice cross sections and serve with forks, and glasses of plain kefir with spoons. Instruct your guests to alternate bites of meat pie and spoonfuls of kefir. Also, some like a little sour cream with their meat pie.

Copyright Lindsay Sterling Feb. 2012

The Story

A Bosnian Serb’s Meat Pie

By Lindsay Sterling

A cooking lesson with an immigrant is like love. It comes when I least expect it. This time I was getting my teeth cleaned. The accent I was listening to was my dental hygienist’s, Sanja Bukarac, her golden green eyes upside-down next to her face mask: “How about next Friday?” Turns out, she is not only the best dentil hygienist I’ve ever had – not a moment of discomfort – she also grew up in what used to be Yugoslavia (the part that is today Bosnia and Herzegovina) and would be happy to teach me how to make her favorite meal from her childhood: burek, a meat pie wrapped in phyllo dough.

At her house in an outer Forest suburb, she continued, “It’s like a pizza place here. Burek, there.” She rolled sautéed ground meat and scallions into sheets of phyllo dough to make the shapes of dinner candles. Then she bundled three of these together by rolling them all inside another sheet of phyllo. She put this roll-of-rolls with two more into a greased casserole dish, then sprayed the top with oil and popped the dish in the oven for forty-five minutes.

Question: where’s the ghastly amount of butter that usually goes with phyllo? Phyllo dough is basically like tissue paper made out of flour and water. Once baked, it’s fun to eat – crunchy, delicate and flakey. But without something moist to hold it together, like butter, the phyllo dough would just flake apart into a mess. Sanja mixed raw egg and yogurt together and drizzled that mixture with a spoon onto the meat before rolling each tube, and again onto the three tubes before wrapping them into a bundle. Substituting butter with a small amount of egg and yogurt... my cholesterol hygienist will not believe how clean my arteries are!

While the meat pie baked in the oven for 45 minutes, Sanja shared the story of how she got here. The power had been out for two whole years. Normal teenage stuff like romance went completely missing. She’d been shot at twice by snipers for simply existing. Then she met a guy. Guess where. Just guess. In a dentist’s office! She was in her twenties, working. He came in for an appointment. They dated and fell in love in the middle of the Bosnian War, got married, and escaped together to Serbia, where his mother lived. Serbia turned out to be troubled too. People were being thrown in jail and beaten because of the sound of their names. After three years of displacement, Sanja finally moved to the U.S. with her husband. When they first arrived here, they took a picture of a refrigerator filled with groceries because they’d never seen that before.

Once the top of the burek was crispy and golden brown, she served slices on small plates and glasses of kefir with spoons in them. She instructed me to take a bite of the burek and then a spoonful of plain kefir. I was hesitant. Plain kefir? Straight? It was delicious! So this is what plain kefir was made for! Since the pressure is on this week for love, I might suggest making burek and remembering as we eat it: if we are with loved ones and not being shot at, life is good. And if you’re looking for love, it can’t hurt to visit the dentist.