Zucchini Börek

Mike and I love Anthony Bourdain's show "No Reservations". The latest episode was shot in Istanbul and featured some incredible-looking food. We knew nothing about Turkey (heck, I didn't even know where it was, which isn't surprising coming from me since I have absolutely no knowledge of geography) and certainly didn't know what constituted Turkish food, so we were happily surprised to hear about dishes combining elements from all of our favorite kinds of food. Okay, not so much the sweetbreads and testicles, but the other stuff sounded really tasty.

One of the dishes that he ate at someone's home was called zucchini börek. It's basically phyllo dough layered with a zucchini and cheese mixture and it looked really amazing. I decided to see if I could find a recipe for it, and low and behold, the internet provided. "Almost Turkish Recipes" has the below recipe, which I made for dinner tonight and served with a green salad and Aidell's Garlic and Gruyere Cheese sausages.

Ingredients:

1 box of phyllo dough (about 14 sheets) or 2 boxes if using double sheets

Filling:

4 cups of grated zucchini

3 eggs

1/2 cup finely chopped dill

1/3 cup finely chopped mint or 3 Tbsp. dried mint flakes

1/2 cup crumbled white Turkish cheese or feta

1 Tbsp. paprika

1 Tbsp. or less black pepper

salt to taste, depending on how salty the cheese is

1 tsp. spicy red pepper flakes (optional)

For brushing phyllo:

3 Tbsp. olive oil

1/2 cup plain yogurt (any fat content)

Directions:

Thaw frozen phyllo according to package directions.

Mix all filling ingredients together in a bowl and let sit for 10-15 minutes.

In the meantime, grease an 11 x 13 or 11x11 baking sheet or line with a Sil-pat.

After sitting, filling will be very wet. Squeeze excess liquid out and put into a separate bowl.

Add yogurt and olive oil to the liquid and mix well. This will be used to brush the phyllo.

Place a phyllo, wide side facing you, on the counter. Brush it with the yogurt mixture.

Place a second phyllo on top and brush it with the yogurt mixture.

Note: Phyllo is very thin, so you may want to use 2 sheets together instead of one. If you decide to use double sheets, you will need at least 28 sheets total.

Place about 1/7 of filling along long side of phyllo and roll tightly into a long, thin cigar shape.

Coil roll into a tight spiral on the baking sheet.

Repeat brushing, filling, rolling and coiling 6 more times, until all of filling has been used.

Brush top of borek with remaining liquid.

Bake at 350 until golden brown, about 50 minutes.

Cut into triangle pie slices to serve.

I had never worked with phyllo before, so the first couple of rolls were a bit tricky to deal with. I also just used single sheets instead of double, making it that much harder. Once I got the hang of separating the sheets and layering them, though, it wasn't difficult, just time-consuming, to put this together. It has an interesting combination of flavors, that actually went quite well with the sausages we used. I think if I made this again, I would double the cheese in it since we couldn't taste it at all.

There were several other börek recipes on this site that I think I'd prefer to this one. There is a spinach version that sounds very good and another with ground beef that I'd like to try. It was fun to try something really different, though, and got us out of the rut of eating the same dishes over and over and over.