Kaytaz böreği – Hatay mini "pizza"
Crispy bites with a delicious meat topping.
Somewhat confusingly, a börek isn’t always a börek. In most of Turkey, the term is reserved for stuffed savoury pastries made with filo pastry. In South Eastern Turkey, however, börek’s also used to describe a range of pizza-like flatbreads with topping, known as pide in the rest of the country.
Among them, kaytaz böreği (pronounced “kaı-taz b3reh-i”), a sort of mini “pizza” similar to lahmacun. But rather than being thin and pizza-like, it’s crispy and flaky, the base is more akin to pastry than yeasted dough. The topping is flavoured in a different way too, with pomegranate molasses adding delicious undernotes of acidity for a dangerously more-ish flavour.
I’m not going to pretend I’m an expert on the making of kaytaz böreği. The aunties of Hatay would surely have another trick or two that I could do well with learning.
But I’m also confident that my attempts would be accepted as fairly authentic, even if my technique could probably still do with some improvement. And it’s too good to keep to myself. Since starting to test this recipe a few weeks ago, I’ve been keeping them in the freezer. Somehow every single batch has disappeared within a week.