Today i was seriously craving chebureki, and it didn’t even matter that we had an overload of deep fried food this weekend.
Well one can get chebureki in any russian grocery here but i don’t care much for the taste. Another option is to make chebureki myself but up until now my attempts to recreate this divine food of my students year pretty much failed.
I opted for the homemade and the magic mercifully happened!
In fact the result was something i lost any hope to achieve: a juicy almost fluid filling, the thinnest crust – both crispy and supple if you can imagine such thing, and those incomparable surface bubbles
I guess this was the point when all the reading and thinking just came together and my perseverance got rewarded… big juicy time!

Here’s the magic in plain english:
the filling: 0.66lb ground beef (i bet lamb will be even better), 1 med large onion, whizzed in food processor with 3 garlic cloves, some dill chopped, several (8 maybe?) table spoons of rich home chicken stock to get the filling to quite wet consistency.
Used Nasoya egg roll skins – next time i will use Melissa – they’re better but Nasoya worked too.
Formed and pressed the pies by a large dumpling press. Very flat spread out filling. In fact flat is a key here.
Shallow fried in probably 1/4″ of peanut oil: on a reasonably high heat. 1-2mins per side. Lots of paper towels to remove the excess oil though pies came out reasonably non greasy.
And then let them rest in 200F oven, to improve the texture, for at least 30mins.
I feel inspired and will keep refining the technique.

Mediterranean dishes are funny this way. You look at the recipe for water borek (turkish) and then for achma (georgian) and you coudn’t tell one from the other…

Tonight i was trying to recreate a dish i had many many years ago in Moscow: i didn’t remember the name but from my memory it resembled both borek and achma…

I started with a recipe for a turkish water borek, by the esteemed Binnur and streamlined, streamlined, streamlined… Used a small pyrex dish the size of an eggroll sheet. Didn’t boil the sheets, and used 2 instead of 4 for dough layers. Same amount of filling, in 3 layers though. Halved the amount of topping. Kept int he fridge for an hour only.
Baked as per the original recipe.
Came out nice and indeed reminded a borek very much though not the dish from my memory…

Oh and btw – have you noticed the Valentine theme?