Boyoz Recipe

Boyoz is one of the recipes I have worked on the most and tried the most. If there is no other recipe I'm skipping right now, cevizli sucuk and boyoz can bear away the bell together in this regard. At one point you could find a piece of boyoz, made in a different ways, in different parts of the house.

At least cevizli sucuk is a food that can be stored for a long time. For Boyoz  that is not possible. Although I tried to keep some of them by freezing. Let me share my experience on this by the way. If you have to, you can freeze them. But thawed boyoz is never a substitute for the fresh one. If you want to store the boyoz by freezing, after completing the 18th step of the recipe, instead of baking, you can freeze them so that they do not touch each other, and put them in a bag after freezing and store them in the freezer and bake them directly without thawing when you want to eat them.

You can use this freezing method for all pastries that don't contain or contain very little yeast, such as crunchy ankara simit. It is the most practical way to freeze pastries without baking. However, freezing the dough before shaping and waiting it to thaw and come to room temperature will take longer than kneading the dough from scratch, and it is risky because the yeast that has been frozen and thawed may die. That's why I don't recommend freezing yeast pastries such as cheese pogaca, even if you shape them. But if you don't mind taking the risk of throwing away a tray of pastries to save half an hour, that's up to you, of course.

Can the Dough Be Stored in the Refrigerator?

The subject of this recipe is not this at all and I have written in many recipes before, but let's talk about this subject again when I just mentioned freezing dough. First of all, it would be useful to explain roughly how yeast dough works. Yeas is a living thing, which means it can also die. Dry yeasts are deactivated fungis. As they get wet and eat the sugar in the dough, they come to life and flourish. As the yeast eats sugar, carbon dioxide is released. The inside of the dough is filled with this gas and the dough rises. Baking at the point where the yeast is best saturated and the gas in the dough is at maximum level allows you to obtain puffy pastries. When you pass this point, the sugar in the dough will decrease and the yeast will start to die slowly, as it will starve. That's why waiting the dough for too long causes the yeast to die, the dough to scatter in your hands and it starts to smell bad.

If you provide the dough with a cold environment (for example, placing in the refrigerator) slows down this process, but does not stop it. So the yeast continues to die, albeit more slowly. When you decide to use the dough, it may not be completely dead and you may not experience a noticeable problem, but you can as well. It's up to you to take the risk or not. My labor, time and money for the ingredients I use are valuable, so despite all my years of experience and the chance to minimize the risk with certain precautions, I do not take this risk and never freeze yeast dough. If you have a larger warranty source that I do not have, or if your labor, time and money you use are not that valuable, you can freeze them. After talking about this subject, which has nothing to do with the boyoz recipe, let's talk about the history of the boyoz.

Boyoz was brought to İzmir by Sephardic people who migrated from Spain. It is the Spanish pronunciation of the Spanish word bollos. In Spanish, two l's are pronounced as y, and the letter s can be pronounced with a sound close to z from time to time. Bollo means small, round loaf/bun. Bollos is the plural form.

When I searched for the trace of the boyoz in Spain, I could not find any information in written sources. However, considering the method of preparation, I come across a recipe that is likely to be the ancestor of the boyoz in Spain; ensaimada, a pastry from Mallorca. Just like boyoz, in Ensaimada, the dough is greased and rolled by hand very very thin. The method changes after that. The rolled dough is shaped like a rose shaped borek by wrapping it around itself. It is then baked. This shaping difference at the last point is not the only difference between Ensaimada and boyoz. Ensaimada is made from yeast dough and with lard. In other words, since it swells during baking, the final product is not a crispy pastry like boyoz, but a soft pastry like pogaca.

It is known that Ensaimada is a Jewish (or Arabic) recipe that used to be made with butter instead of lard. It is named ensaimada (with lard/containing lard), derived from the Catalan word saim (lard) because the church insisted on the use of lard to drive Jews and Arabs away from the region.

If ensaimada is the ancestor of the boyoz, what if the Jews screwed up the Spaniards sharing the recipe with them saying, "Yeah, we are making it leavened, go ahead and use masa madre." and they made such thin dough leaves (it's not an easy thing and it takes time) just to get a regular soft bun, or after they came to Izmir, they somehow realized that yeast was not necessary for the dough and found the magnificent boyoz. Whatever happened happened and thankfully the boyoz has managed to come to these days and added richness to Turkish cuisine.

Boyoz is traditionally eaten with boiled eggs, as some of you know. But if I am not going to break the hearts of the people of Izmir, as a Thracian, I prefer to eat it with Turkish white cheese.

I'll go back to the beginning of the article and talk about how hard I worked on this recipe. It wasn't because I couldn't make it, but I had an almost impossible dream; a boyoz with less butter. Boyoz is normally a very, very greasy pastry. When the amount of butter is reduced, it becomes like a hard pogaca. But when the two are well balanced, you can get a boyoz that is not overly greasy but still crunchy. All you have to do is follow the recipe step by step.

Enjoy the recipe...

Bon Appetit...