Burek, the greasy, filling Balkan mad scientist’s improvement on meat pies, has had a sketchy history in Budapest. In years past it was available at summer bars, particularly those featuring Yugo-refugee chefs fleeing the most recent Balkan war. One baker – a Serb from Kosovo – supplied a string of alternative night spots with burek for a few years, and his departure left Budapest late-night eaters like junkies without a fix. Until now. Because burek is back.
On the corner of Király utca and Csengery utca in district VII one finds a small, nondescript bakery, with the unassuming name of Király Pék. But there is one big difference: fresh burek. Stuffed with meat – or, for vegetarians, cheese – this is the real thing, the holy grail of Balkan fast food.
Generally eaten as a breakfast food alongside yoghurt in Serbia and Croatia, and well known to anybody who has sought a late night snack in Istanbul, burek is an old Turkish food tradition. Layered pies of flat bread or pasta sheets substituted for risen-yeast cakes during the nomadic Turkish past, and were imported into the Balkan food tradition by Ottoman-era bakers. In Hungary, the strudel tradition is all that remains. For reasons unknown, the savory meat and cheese fillings fell out of use in Hungary, and only the sweet fruit, cheese, and poppy seed fillings found popularity. Burek is made by preparing a special pastry dough – called yufka in Turkish – which is thicker than strudel sheets but thinner than pasta, and then rolling meat, cheese, or spinach into a log or pie shape before baking.
Burek is baked by specialty bakers, and the Király utca shop is run by the Pavlovity family, Croatian émigrés from Serbian Vojvodina. (The bakery is also known as the Pavlovity Pékség.) In addition to burek, they have lots of retes (strudel), whole-wheat breads, as well as fine Franck coffee from Croatia. A serving of meat burek (1/4 pie) is a hefty snack at a mere Ft 420 (€1.70), cheese at Ft 370. Order a few full pies in advance of your next wild Serbian party, and there will be something to soak up all that slivovica…
UPDATE: It turns out it was only a bad non-burek dream.
