Banitsa bulgarian- a cake with a centuries-old and very interesting history. Banitsa in Bulgarian cuisine is no less important than borscht in Ukrainian cuisine, or in Georgian. Not one celebration is complete without it, be it New Year or Easter. Bulgarian banitsa is made from thin stretched dough, moreover, the filling in it can be completely different. Bulgarian banitsa is considered traditional, cooked with feta cheese, eggs, sour cream and butter. Sirene cheese, which is very similar in taste, is often used.

Also used are cottage cheese, sauerkraut, minced meat, cherries, apples. The filling can be either one-component or complex, consisting of several ingredients. Quite often they combine cottage cheese with herbs, eggs, berries or fruits. So, it turns out very tasty banitsa with feta cheese and spinach, stuffed with potatoes and pumpkin, with minced meat and stewed cabbage.

The season also has a significant effect on the prevailing type of filling. In summer, a lot of fresh herbs and herbs are added to the filling. They use basil leaves, marjoram, purslane, spinach, nettle, bergenia, Swiss chard, beet tops, sorrel, mustard leaves, cucumber herb, mint, sage, green onions, parsley.

Banitsa Bulgarian. Photo

Enjoy your meal. I would be glad if this Bulgarian banitsa recipe you liked it and will come in handy.

Traditional Bulgarian pastries, the first mention of which has been known since the 11th century! So banitsa is already 10 centuries old, no less, but this delicious pastry is still loved and respected, cooked and eaten with appetite not only in Bulgaria, but also in Greece, Serbia, Moldova.

Bulgarians definitely prepare banitsa for Christmas and New Years, for a variety of holidays and just like that, whenever they want! Having tried this simple and mouth-watering dish once, you will also often repeat your favorite recipe.

The classic banica is made from stretched dough, similar to strudel dough. If you want a quick option, you can use ready-made filo dough. And if there is none on sale, then you can bake a puff yeast-free banitsa.

There are different ways to form a banica. In this recipe, the filling is placed between the layers of the dough. If stretched dough is used, it is rolled together with the filling into rolls, as for, and laid either in a spiral or in rows.

The filling can be prepared not only from feta cheese; there are many other tasty options: onions with eggs (greens and leeks), as for pies or puffs; with cottage cheese, sweet and salty; with meat and onions; with pumpkin or apples, like pies ...

You can bake in a shape or a baking sheet, round, rectangular or square, the main thing is that the sides are high enough so that the filling does not run away. By the way, in the original, banitsa is poured not with simple milk, but with sour, or Bulgarian yogurt, mixed with eggs.

I baked in a 35x25 cm mold, it is also possible in another - the main thing is to "adjust" the dough to its size. The puff pastry can be rolled out, don't worry about it: it stratified perfectly! This time I cheekily rolled it not only in one direction, but first from the center to one edge, then again from the center to the other, and then a few more edges that are smaller in width.

Ingredients:

• 450 g of puff yeast-free dough;
• 200-250 g feta cheese;
• A bunch of green onions;
• 1 PC. leeks;
• 30 g of butter (for filo you need 50 g, and for puff less, since it already contains butter);
• 2 eggs;
• 120 ml of milk.

How to bake:

Defrost puff pastry at room temperature. When it becomes soft, grease a sheet of parchment with vegetable oil, put a strip of dough on paper and roll it out to fit your mold.

Together with the parchment, we transfer the cake to the mold.

Rub the cheese on a coarse grater and distribute it evenly over the cake.

Rinse and dry the greens. Cut the leek stalk into thin rings and chop the green onion. Sprinkle with herbs cheese.

Having slightly sprinkled the table with flour, roll out the second strip of dough to the size of the first one and, after winding it on a rolling pin, transfer it to the mold. Cover the bottom with the filling with the upper crust. I didn't know whether to pinch the edges, so I just pressed the edges of the top cake to the bottom.

Now we cut the blank for the bath into several large pieces, cutting through the dough almost to the bottom. I cut it into 8 pieces.

Melt the butter and spread it over the top of the pie, so as to evenly lubricate the surface, and some of the butter gets into the cuts. It is convenient to use a pastry brush.

We turn on the oven, let it heat up to 180C.

Prepare the filling by whisking eggs and milk.

Fill the banitsa evenly with fill, so that it falls into the cuts. Do not pour directly from the bowl - there is a risk of spilling everything at once into one part of the pie. It is much more convenient to pour a little with a tablespoon. Then I shook the shape from side to side, so that the fill was evenly distributed and went into the cuts.

We put the baking dish in the oven and bake at 180C for about 30-35 minutes - until the dough is flaked and golden brown. The finished banitsa fits noticeably, becomes high, browns. After taking it out of the oven, the cake may sink a little, it's not scary. And you can make sure that it is ready with a wooden skewer, checking if the dough is dry.

When the banica has cooled down a little, you can gently take out the portioned pieces from the mold (just walk a little more with a knife along the cuts and pry with a spatula) and put them on plates.

Bon Appetit!

I liked the puff pan so much that the next day I baked it again according to this recipe! And I experimented with the filling: I added hard-boiled eggs, cut into cubes to the cheese, and I made half of the banitsa with a sweet filling - from apples with cinnamon and sugar. But still, the option with feta cheese and herbs came to our taste more than anyone else!

Banitsa pie is a classic Bulgarian cuisine dish with a rich centuries-old history. Travelers of the 18th century wrote about the amazing taste of this dish, but the first mentions of it date back to the 10th-11th centuries. To this day, banitsa is one of the most popular and favorite dishes of the Bulgarian cuisine, widely known both in Bulgaria and far beyond its borders.

In Bulgaria, banitsa is an indispensable attribute of both the festive and everyday menu. The pie is prepared with different fillings depending on the occasion and season. The most popular, classic version of the banitsa is prepared with a filling of feta cheese, eggs, sour milk and butter. In the spring, fresh herbs are often added to the filling. For the colder seasons, there are options with sauerkraut, meat, potatoes and pumpkin.

Banitsa is often served for breakfast on the daily menu. For the holidays, a festive version of the banitsa is prepared, which is served before or instead of dessert. According to the ancient tradition, it is customary to lay small objects in the New Year's banitsa, which are a symbol of what awaits a person in the coming year. For example, laurel leaves, coins, twigs and berries, symbolizing love, luck and prosperity, happiness, prosperity.

At present, ready-made stretched dough or filo dough is often used to prepare banitsa. But according to ancient customs, every girl should be able to cook “the right banitsa” from home-made, thinly rolled stretched dough. Let's try to learn and we ?!

To prepare Bulgarian banitsa, prepare the ingredients according to the list.

Measure out the required amount of flour and sift thoroughly to make the dough airy and light.

Make a well in the center of the flour and add salt, egg, oil, water and vinegar. The use of vinegar in the dough is one of the options for making the dough for the banya. Adding vinegar is believed to make the dough more elastic and roll out more thinly. According to another popular version of the recipe, the dough is prepared without vinegar with the same other ingredients.

Combine the ingredients and knead to a smooth, firm dough. The dough turns out to be very plastic and non-sticky, it is easy to roll it out on a dry work surface without adding flour or oil.

Divide the dough into an even number of small pieces. Shape each piece into a ball. Brush the surface of the dough balls with vegetable oil. From the indicated amount of ingredients, I got 24 small balls of dough. From this amount of dough, you can make 2 banits.

Leave half of the balls of dough on the board, and place the other on top of them and press down with your fingers.

Roll the balls back into 12 pieces of dough. Place the dough on a floured board and place in the cold. It is recommended to keep the dough in the refrigerator overnight before rolling it out or, if in a hurry, place it in the freezer for 30-40 minutes. I preferred the first option and, tightly wrapping the board with dough in cling film, placed it in the refrigerator overnight.

An important point - in the freshly made dough, vinegar was clearly felt, but after 12 hours in the refrigerator, the taste and smell of vinegar disappeared, and in the dough and in the finished cake, its presence was not felt. If there is no time to infuse the dough, I think it is better to reduce the amount of vinegar and use more delicate varieties, for example, wine vinegar.

Prepare the filling for the banitsa. To do this, grate or crush the cheese.

Dissolve soda in kefir, sour cream or yogurt. Sour milk is used in Bulgaria, which can be replaced with another fermented milk product. Soda is added to make the filling airy. Add yogurt, eggs, ground black pepper and salt to taste. Mix everything thoroughly.

Add fresh herbs if desired. Popular options: spinach, young beet tops, leeks. I used 0.5 bunch spinach and 0.5 bunch sorrel.

Melt the butter.

Grease a baking dish with a little oil, line with baking paper. Grease the paper with a thin layer of melted butter.

Roll out the dough as thin as possible until it is almost transparent. In order to make it more convenient to work with the dough, it is recommended to roll out the dough on polyethylene or oilcloth. To work with such a dough, a special very long and thin rolling pin is used, but you can also use a regular rolling pin, pull and stretch the dough with your hands.

Brush a sheet of dough with melted butter and apply a layer of filling evenly.

Roll the dough into a roll. Grease the surface of the roll with butter.

Roll up the roll and place in a baking dish. Brush with a thin layer of butter.

Repeat the procedure with the rest of the dough and filling, gradually filling in the form.

Lubricate the surface of the jar with melted butter, and then apply a layer of yogurt or other fermented milk product.

Bake the banitsa in an oven preheated to 200 degrees for 35–40 minutes. I followed the recommendation to bake the banitsa for the first 20 minutes at 200 degrees, then, when the top of the pie is browned, cover with foil and, reducing the temperature to 180 degrees, bake for another 20 minutes. And, if time and patience allow, reduce the temperature to a minimum and darken the finished banitsa in the stove for another 15–20 minutes.

Bulgarian banitsa is ready.

The finished cake has a very delicate delicate taste. Freshly baked and still hot, it is extraordinarily tasty; banitsa does not lose its attractiveness even when chilled.

Reading the recipe, it may seem that a lot of butter is used, but in fact, its consumption is small, because the butter is applied in a thin layer. I used about 100-110 grams of homemade butter, the banitsa turned out to be very juicy, light and tender.

Layered cake with an interesting name Banitsa is a widespread and really popular dish, which has an ancient history and owes its origin to the Bulgarian cuisine. If you carefully study the world literature of the 11th century, you can find references to the Bulgarian banitsa pie, which has another name - "mlina". In the literature of those times, this pie belongs to the most delicious and unusually healthy dishes from Bulgaria.

The inhabitants of this country themselves cannot imagine their New Year's or Christmas table without a fragrant, surprisingly tasty and prepared banitsa in compliance with all the rules.

This dish is an indispensable attribute of any weekend or holiday; Bulgarians love to cook it on weekdays as well.

Any housewife can easily prepare this nutritious and traditional Bulgarian cuisine pie. There are several ways to prepare the cake in question. It used to be difficult to purchase filo dough made using a special technology in a retail store, from which a real banica could turn out. Today the situation has changed dramatically, and it became possible to find filo dough in any supermarket.

Consider a simple recipe for filo dough for a puff Bulgarian pie. Its manufacture does not cause significant difficulties for beginners and inexperienced housewives.

A set of products for the preparation of filo puff pastry

• wheat flour - 500 grams;
• kefir with a fat content of 3.2% or low-calorie sour cream - 100 grams;
• clean drinking water heated to a temperature of 40 degrees - two teaspoons;
• Sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) - 1/2 teaspoon
• table salt or iodized salt - to taste.

Recipe

1. Pour a small pile of flour on your work surface, in the middle of it, place the ingredients indicated in this recipe. Then knead an elastic dough, divide it into 10 equal parts and cover them with a terry towel for 120 minutes.
2. Take a wooden rolling pin in your hands and gently roll each part of the dough to form the thinnest plates that resemble paper sheets. Now form the banica on a heatproof baking sheet.
3. The finished product is neatly rolled out sheets of dough, similar in appearance to paper.

Residents of Bulgaria prefer to make the dough for the banitsa and the filling for it with their own hands, without using ready-made solutions.

Cake shape

The puff pie, which has become the epitome of Bulgarian cuisine, can be made in various variations. Its shape is fully consistent with the personal preferences of the hostess.

Many girls like the banitsa, made in the form of a luxurious pie that takes up the entire heat-resistant baking sheet.

Some housewives give the Bulgarian pie the shape of special rolls resembling tubes, which are stacked on a heat-resistant baking sheet in a circle.

In this case, the first roll is placed exactly in the middle of the baking sheet and is twisted in such a way that in its appearance it begins to resemble a snail shell. The rest of the tubes must be carefully laid in a circle, placing them along the edges of the baking sheet.

There are also some Bulgarian women who prefer to lay rolls made of unleavened dough on a heat-resistant baking sheet in a straight line and try to place them in close proximity to each other.

Cake recipe

Preparing a banica according to the classic recipe requires minimal effort and affordable products.

It is necessary that you use a heat-resistant dish or a baking sheet with high sides. Let's consider how to make a Bulgarian pie in accordance with the established rules. It is recommended to use sheep's milk cheese (feta cheese), yogurt produced in Bulgaria, sour milk, chicken eggs as its filling.

An invariable component of the traditional Bulgarian pie is unleavened filo dough, bought in the store or made by hand. In the given recipe, we will consider the option of making a banica using factory-made dough.

Required Ingredients

• filo dough packaging, weighing 500 grams;
• sheep's milk cheese, that is, feta cheese - about 300-350 grams;
• softened butter - 50 grams;
• olive or vegetable oil - 60 ml;
• raw chicken eggs - three pieces.
• natural yogurt - 200 ml. If this product is not at hand, then replace it with low-fat sour cream, sour milk or low-fat kefir.

Before use, milk or kefir should be settled in a place protected from direct sunlight. Wait until a characteristic sediment appears on the bottom of the container with any of the listed products. Having found this sediment, drain the kefir or sour milk from the container and strain the remaining thick. Use a fine sieve or a folded gauze pad.

Making cheese filling

Preparing the baking sheet

Spreading out the filling

You should get small pieces. Rub them lightly with your fingers and place on top of your layer cake. Drizzle over the rest of the yogurt, chicken eggs and butter mixture. On a work surface, cut a piece of butter into small cubes that are the same size and place them on the finished pan.

Baking a pie

Preheat an electric or gas oven to 180 degrees. Place the puff pastry on a heatproof baking sheet and bake at this temperature for 25 minutes.

After this time, immediately reduce the heating temperature to 130 degrees. Let the banitsa simmer in the oven for 25 minutes. Bake until golden brown. Hot or cold, the pie is equally tasty and healthy, this is the recipe.

This is how we prepared the Banitsa pie with feta cheese. We hope that your gastronomic preferences will be fully satisfied with a pie made according to an old recipe and owes its origin to the Bulgarian cuisine.

Perhaps you will be interested in the recipe for the Greek Spanakopita Spitan Pie - it is also made from filo dough.

Today the dish of the day is Bulgarian cottage cheese banitsa (sometimes they write banitsa). Because I already have it in my arsenal, I also know how to make cottage cheese muffins well, but I wanted something unusual. I shoveled through a mountain of literature and looked through hundreds of pages of recipes on the Internet and found one very interesting idea for using curd in this recipe.

What is Banitsa

Banitsa! Here's what I need - and salty pie, and the use of cottage cheese, and the benefits, and taste! Banitsa with cottage cheese (or "banitsa") is a Bulgarian cuisine dish. As a rule, it is made from a special type of dough, the so-called draft, which is very thin in structure and delicate in taste.

The pie is filled with feta cheese, but sometimes Bulgarians make “green banitsa” with spinach and herbs or pumpkin (with pumpkin and nuts). Each family has its own recipe for making such baked goods, passed down from generation to generation. But the most basic criterion for a good banica is the crispy top of the pie and the very juicy filling.

We, dear readers of the blog "", will prepare our own, special banitsa - with cottage cheese, and our dough will be unleavened, not draft. Let's try what comes out of it.

Cottage cheese banny recipe: ingredients

For the test:

• 2 cups sifted wheat flour
• 1 egg
• half a glass of water
• salt to taste

For filling:

• half a kilogram of fat cottage cheese 9%
• 2 eggs
• Salt to taste

For the cream:

• 150 grams of sour cream 10%
• 2 eggs

Nutritional value per 100 g:

1. Calories: 193.51
2. Proteins: 11.17
3. Fats 6.63
4. Carbohydrates: 22.09

Bulgarian bannitsa: a recipe at home

Step 1. Sift the required amount of flour through a fine sieve directly onto a cutting board, on which we will knead the dough. We form a kind of flour slide.

Step 2. In the middle of the slide we make a funnel into which we will place the following ingredients.

Step 3. Break one egg into a depression and add some flour.

Step 4. Add water a little at a time, gently kneading the dough. This must be done in a special way: stir the food in the middle with your fingers, gradually adding flour from the edges. The dough is kneaded in a depression, and not immediately from the entire portion of flour.

Step 5. Thus, you should get a rather tight unleavened dough. Knead it until it stops sticking to your hands. As the rule says: the dough is ready only when the hands are clean.

Instead of this dough, use ready-made filo dough or pita bread sheets. You will end up with a lazy banica.

Step 6. And now, in my opinion, a very interesting moment. We will roll out the dough in a not quite traditional way: on a towel. Sprinkle the sifted flour on a linen towel and spread the dough on it. We roll it with a rolling pin into a layer 1-1.5 cm thick.

Step 7. Melt the butter and brush the entire surface of the dough with a brush.

As I noted above, Bulgarians make banitsa with salted feta cheese, as well as spinach, pumpkin, cabbage, meat, etc. We are making a cottage cheese pie today. To do this, we need crumbly, fatty cottage cheese (fat content should be at least 9%).

If you decide to make the pie less high in calories, then you simply risk ruining it, since it is the fat of the cottage cheese that will give the pie the necessary juiciness and taste. When choosing cottage cheese on the market, try spreading it on a slice of bread: if the cottage cheese crumbles from the bread, it does not suit us, but if it lays down softly, then this is what we need!

Step 8. To prepare the filling for the banitsa, lightly knead the curd in a bowl with a fork and add one egg. Stir and add salt to taste, as you like.

Forming a Bulgarian banica: combining dough and filling

Step 9. With a teaspoon, spread the curd filling on the surface of the dough, not distributing it specifically, but just in heaps.

Step 10. The crucial moment has come: with the help of a towel we turn the edge of the dough to the middle and gently, carefully roll up the dough stuffed with a roll. We fold everything very tightly and fix the edge. Or make some small filo dough rolls.

Step 11. And now we will fold our roll in the form of a snail - from edge to end, also very tightly.

Step 12. Lightly grease the glass form with oil and put our "snail" in it. Next, grease the top of the banitsa with melted butter. We send the form to the oven, preheated to 220 degrees, for 5-7 minutes, so that the crust "grabs".

Fill for banitsa

To prepare a good cream filling for the banica, we first need to prepare the sour cream. To do this, put the required amount of sour cream on cheesecloth folded in 4 layers and leave to decant overnight. Only in this case we will get sour cream of the desired consistency. By the way, this sour cream is also suitable for making any other cream - it will come out thick, will not drain.

Step 13. Add eggs to sour cream and bring the mass to taste: add salt, pepper. Knead thoroughly until a homogeneous cream is obtained. Then fill the hot banitsa with pouring, evenly distributing it over the entire surface of the pie.

Step 14. We send the cake to the oven again. He will stay there for another 20 minutes.

We take out the Bulgarian cottage cheese banitsa from the oven and let it cool down a little. The pie is served warm and with sour milk. Help yourself to a wonderful, healthy, aromatic banica! Bon Appetit!

Video: how to cook a lazy pita bread