Try this Mushroom bourekas recipe, or contribute your own.
- 1/2 teaspoon salt (or more to taste)
- 1/2 a package of store-bought phyllo dough
- 2 pounds mushrooms
- 2 red onions (or a combination of sweet and red onio
- 2 tb of margarine (or butter if you’re not vegan or lactose-intolerant)
- 1 tb of olive oil
- 2 teaspoons dry thyme or 2 tb fresh thyme (fresh is better)
- juice of 1/8 of a lemon
- 1 tb margarine (or butter) melted
- Carbohydrate 29.755659472 g
- Cholesterol 0 mg
- Fat 4.77192811457347 g
- Fiber 9.0718474 g
- Protein 28.032008466 g
- Saturated Fat 0.623099438003025 g
- Serving Size 1 1 recipe (909g)
- Sodium 45.3929869999715 mg
- Sugar 20.683812072 g
- Trans Fat 1.47904938916137 g
- Calories 214 calories
Step-by-step
- If working with frozen dough, defrost your phyllo dough overnight in the fridge, or leave on the counter for a few hours.
- Preheat your oven to 350 degrees Farenheit.
- Chop onions finely.
- Preheat a pan over medium heat. Once pan is hot, add your margarine and oil and let it melt. Add onions to the pan and cook over medium heat for 5-10 minutes, until they are starting to turn translucent. Lower heat to low, and let onions reduce and caramelize for 20 minutes.
- Slice mushrooms, taking care to not slice too thinly or too thickly. Chop the larger slices into smaller pieces. You want your mushrooms to retain their meatiness, but also be small enough to fit into phyllo triangles.
- Add mushrooms to the pan with the onions, and raise heat to medium. Let cook until mushrooms brown, about 10-15, stirring occasionally.
- Add herbs, salt, and lemon, tasting and correcting flavours as necessary. You want the filling to be rich, earthy, sweet and salty, but with a burst of bright acidity that cuts through the meatiness.
- Prepare your phyllo dough. Cover your work surface with parchment paper. Line two cookie sheets with parchment paper, and oil them slightly. If you haven’t done so yet, melt 1 tablespoon of margarine in a small bowl, and dilute it with 1 teaspoon of water.
- Carefully spread out one phyllo sheet on your work surface, covering the rest with a towel so they don’t dry out. With a pastry brush, lightly brush your sheet with the melted margarine and water mixture. Cover it in half lengthwise, and dab lightly with the margarine mixture.
- To prepare the bourekas, spoon 1 tablespoon of the mushrooms and onion filling at the right end of the strip. Fold the end of the strip diagonally over the filling to form a neat triangle, pushing in the corners to ensure it's nice and snug around the filling. Continue folding the strip over on top of itself, keeping it in a neat triangle after each fold, until you reach the strip’s end (take care to fold the triangles tightly around the filling, as phyllo dough without filling tends to dry out and crisp in the oven). If any errant dough remains at the end of your strip, cut it off. Brush your triangle with the margarine-water mixture, and lay out on the parchment paper-covered cookie sheet.
- Repeat as necessary, until you run out of dough or filling. Any remaining filling will taste great piled on toast.
- Bake the pastries for 15-20 minutes, until they are golden brown. Check periodically after 10 minutes to ensure the pastries are not burning.
- Serve bourekas warm, or hot, or in room temperature, with a light salad or a simple brothy soup. They taste best when eaten fresh, and do not keep well. Reheat the bourekas only in the oven – the microwave will make it soggy.
Why is the phyllo dough tearing halfway through the folding process? Keeping the stack covered with a damp towel prevents the paper-thin sheets from drying out under ambient kitchen air. Defrost frozen dough slowly overnight in the refrigerator to maintain the structural integrity of each individual layer. Working with dry pastry leads to immediate cracking when forming geometric shapes.
Moisture management defines the filling. Two pounds of sliced mushrooms require a full ten to fifteen minutes in a hot pan to release their internal liquid and brown properly. If the onions and fungi retain excess water, the steam will saturate the pastry from the inside out during baking, preventing the desired shatteringly crisp texture at 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
Folding requires precision. Slice the mushrooms large enough to retain meatiness, yet small enough to fit inside the tight triangular parcels without puncturing the delicate edges. Brush each folded layer lightly with a mixture of melted margarine and water to adhere the strata together. Press the corners snugly around the filling so empty pockets do not scorch in the oven.
Baking takes between fifteen and twenty minutes on parchment-lined cookie sheets. Margarine provides a direct dairy-free substitution for butter without altering the browning rate of the pastry. Consume these pastries fresh because residual internal steam softens the crust rapidly during storage, rendering reheating ineffective outside of a dry oven.
