A Dying Art
Istanbul, Turkey 2008
A woman rolls dough as thin as paper with her dowel-shaped rolling pin. She will bake it on something that looks like an up-turned wok. The hot coals are underneath. It works like a tandoor oven but the bread is baked on the outside of the ‘oven’, not the inside.
I was told that no one learns to make yufka these days. You can buy filo dough in your grocer’s freezer section, and it will do nicely for your bourek or baklava or chicken pie, Turkish style.
We visited Istanbul in the mid 70’s and we ate lunch in the restaurant on the top of the Galata Tower. I don’t remember the view but I never forgot a dish similar to macaroni and cheese. It was made using yufka instead of macaroni. So delicious!
When Turkish cookbooks began to appear in stores here in America, I’d buy them hoping to find a recipe for the cheese pie. Finally, twenty years later, I found it in Claudia Roden’s The New Book of Middle Eastern Food. The dish is called Tepsi Boregi: a creamy filo cheese pie is the cook book description. You’ll have to make it at home. You won’t find it in a restaurant anymore, not even in Istanbul.