Boyoz is a popular Turkish snack sold in Izmir’s bakery shops and street vendors. It is a pastry traditionally prepared by Jewish bakers and can be filled with cheese, vegetables, or meat. The main ingredients are water, flour, lemon juice, tahini, and sunflower oil. It is usually eaten for breakfast with hard-boiled eggs and strong tea.
Boyoz, which means “bundle” in the Sephardic Ladin language, is a popular Turkish snack that is sold in Izmir’s bakery shops and street vendors. This Turkish city has been famous for boyoz pastry and other Sephardic desserts since the 1500s when Sephardic Jews fled oppression in Spain and settled in Turkey. Boyoz pastry was traditionally prepared by Jewish bakers only, one of the most famous of them being Avram Usta, but this custom has changed in recent times and the pastry is now made and eaten by all Turkish communities.
In Turkish cuisine, boyoz pasta is usually eaten for breakfast and with boiled eggs and strong tea. The pasta can be plain, or it can have a variety of cheese, vegetable, or meat fillings. It is customary to shape the pastas in a particular way to indicate the filling used. For example, pastries filled with potatoes may be triangular in shape, pastries filled with spinach may be round in shape, and pastries filled with eggplant or zucchini may be square; this, of course, is not a hard and fast rule.
The main ingredients used to make boyoz are water, flour, lemon juice, a sesame paste known as tahini, and sunflower oil. The ingredients are mixed and well kneaded by hand to form a dough, which is then left to rest for about two hours. The dough can then undergo more kneading and more storage time over a period of several hours. Once the dough is well formed and soft, it is cut into small balls and these are then dipped and immersed for an hour in a pan filled with sunflower oil.
The next step is to remove the balls from the oil and roll them into thin, thin rounds. These rounds are folded around the fillings into the required shapes and the bundles are placed in an oven and cooked at a high temperature until they are a nice golden brown. The pastries are now ready to eat and are generally best eaten fresh out of the oven and later in the day. The boyoz pastries sold by street vendors may be more fatty and taste different from those sold in specialty shops. Either way, this Turkish pastry is usually eaten with hard-boiled eggs; these are known as huevo haminado or yumurta and are prepared by roasting eggs over low heat with onions and black pepper until the eggs turn brown.
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