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This may be the last of my yufka posts unless I find good clips and photographs from my visits to Gulluoglu and Imam Cagdas. Yufka for baklava is much thinner than that for regular or su boreks. Until then, you have to do with these clips I shot in a cafe where we had stopped not far from Safranbolu, a UNESCO world heritage site. It was lucky we arrived as the woman was rolling out yufka for su borek (possibly the most famous of all boreks, a meat or cheese pie that is baked whole then divided into square portions). The yufka for su borek is boiled before being used to make the pie, a little like lasagna, and I had been wanting to see the process from when I had read about it in Nevin Halici’s Turkish Cookbook, which by the way is totally brilliant.

It was fascinating to watch the lady roll out the yufka and see how even the circles of dough were. When I learned to make pita bread, I was told I needed to turn the circles of dough a quarter turn in between each rolling out to achieve a perfect circle which makes it easier for the bread to puff out and separate in two layers. It would be too fiddly to turn such large thin circles of dough by hand, so, what she did was to position her oklava (a long thin rolling pin) on the quarter turn to lift the dough and reposition it. Brilliant. Then she laid the yufka on a cloth to dry it slightly before boiling it and spreading it in a baking pan to make su borek, smearing each sheet with melted butter, or perhaps it was ghee, the way you would with filo.  Sadly, we didn’t stay to taste her su borek but I am sure it was very good and now that I have watched how it is made, I am not about to launch into making my own. Simply too fiddly. I will leave it to the specialists and I suggest you do the same!

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