I know I’m behind on my goal of two Hot Bread Kitchen recipes per month. I tried making their monkey bread last weekend but something went wrong with the rising (or lack thereof), as I couldn’t find active dry yeast in the shops here in London — only quick/instant yeast is sold. Anyway, after that failure I ordered some active dry yeast from Amazon and decided to try a non-yeasted recipe this weekend: Albanian Cheese Triangles.
Baking with Hot Bread Kitchen #3: Albanian Cheese Triangles
This recipe comes from the “Filled Doughs” section of The Hot Bread Kitchen Cookbook. Who doesn’t love a good filled dough? I’d always thought filled doughs take ages to make: you have to make the dough, then the filling, then get the filling into the dough before cooking. Albanian cheese triangles (called byrek according to the book), however, sounded delicious and not too complicated to whip up for an easy Sunday dinner. The ingredient list was short and didn’t require and hard-to-find ingredients, plus the filling was cold, which would save on prep time.
It took 40 minutes to make and roll up these savory pockets of goodness. The dough is thin and stretchy and it takes some practice to roll it into triangles around the filling, but I mostly got there in the end. The 45 minutes that the triangles spend in the oven gave me time to prepare a nice salad to enjoy with the byrek.
I popped my triangles in the fridge for the day and baked them just before dinnertime. They turned out golden and flaky, with a light crunch to contrast the creamy filling. No soggy bottoms here! Albanian cheese triangles were surprisingly simple to make and would make great appetizers or nibbles at a brunch or dinner party. It would be adjust the size of the triangles depending on the occasion, and F pointed out that you could use any number of different fillings to complement the neutral crust. I’ll definitely make them again.
Have you ever heard of byrek? Does your culture have a similar filled dough recipe?
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