How To Make Sigara Böreği (Turkish Cheese Rolls)

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When friends come to visit from the UK and go home with Food memories, those delicious ‘Turkish cheese rolls’ that they always talk about are called sigara böreği (cigarette borek) or kalem böreği (pencil borek).

Think slim spring rolls.

‘Kalem böreği’ is the more encouraged name these days. ‘Pencil shaped’ being a more acceptable phrase than a description of ‘cigarette shape.’

And they are probably the most well known of all the Turkish börek recipes – and possibly one of the most well known hot meze dishes of Turkish cuisine.

They’re probably so well known because sigara are the most likely börek to feature in a meze fridge in restaurants.

And they often crop up on the Turkish breakfast table, too.

Along with the almost obligatory Antep Ezmesi, ‘Turkish cheese rolls’ are right up there for number of ‘Turkish foodie mentions’ by our friends.

An Early Experiment

On mastering the Turkish green beans in olive oil recipe back in England, sigara böreği is also the first Turkish food I ever attempted to make when we finally moved to Fethiye.

So, for us, sigara böreği is special for that reason.

I associate them with our ‘we-must-settle-into-our-new-life-in-Turkey’ period. These days, I make sigara böreği if we have friends round for a barbecue.

They make perfect nibbles while we wait for the barbecue to heat up. And all of our friends absolutely love them!

Play Around With Fillings

I also play about with various fillings quite a lot, so some of my sigara are not quite so traditional.

But that’s okay, too, because, these days, lots of the restaurants in Fethiye are starting to play about with fillings, too.

And, why not?

As long as we all know and love the traditional fillings for Turkish cheese rolls, why not experiment, as well?

Isn’t that how cuisines grow and evolve?

Sigara Böreği – A Recipe For Turkish Cheese Rolls

For the cheese filling:

So that leads us nicely onto our filling for our cheese rolls recipe. For sigara böreği, the traditional filling is Lor cheese, a crumbled mild white cheese or beyaz peynir (Turkish white cheese).

If you are outside of Turkey, or you can’t get Lor, feta cheese can be used as a substitute.

We also use a little bit of finely chopped parsley and a beaten egg, too.

Okay, so you know the traditional filling now.

For our sigara böreği recipe, however, if we have friends over to visit, we like to add a few extras to our filling.

The Not So Traditional Ingredients

It’s a mix of reactions from Turkish friends. Some of them bite into our sigara böreği and then a smile appears on their faces.

“Ohhh, have you put onion in this?”

Other Turkish friends will bite into the sigara and look unsure. “Hmmm, have you put onion in this?”

Food leads to discussion, as it should! We love a foodie discussion, and we love playing with recipes. Just as long as we know the traditional recipe, too.

So our sigara böreği has the Lor cheese (lots of Turkish people know it as börek peynir in Turkey so you might see it labelled as that in Turkish supermarkets).

It has the chopped parsley. And it has the beaten egg mixture.

And then we love to add some very finely chopped red onion for colour, texture and flavour.

We also add some very finely chopped red pepper for the same reasons. And then, of course, a bit of fresh chilli, too.

For The Börek Cases – The Yufka:

Sigara böreği is a börek dish. It’s rolls of yufka , which, if you can’t get hold of yufka, can be substituted with phyllo pastry.

If you’re in Turkey, though, or you live in an area where someone is making yufka dough, use the freshest daily yufka as it’s much easier to work with.

It’s delicate, yet forgiving, and almost therapeutic to work with if you handle it confidently.

If the yufka isn’t fresh, or even if it’s vacuum-packed, it will break up whilst you’re trying to roll it. It might even stick together and tear as you try to prise the sheets apart.

We’re writing this from personal experience. And it’s enough to put you off working with yufka for good.

In Turkey, go to your local yufkacı and buy the sheets fresh. You’ll fall in love with the stuff!

Yufka Triangles

As you will have seen in our other börek recipes (such as our paçanga böreği recipe), yufka is sold in huge circular sheets, around 60cm in diameter.

For our cheese rolls, we need to make a pastry triangle for each sigara. This is really easy.

• As you can see in the diagram above, we’re just going to fold a yufka sheet in half and place it on a flat work surface.
• With the straight edge facing away from us, we’re going to start about 4 inches in from the left and cut diagonally towards the bottom left corner. Use a sharp knife so the pastry doesn’t tear.
• Then we go back up the that top starting pointing and cut diagonally towards the right bottom, giving us an approximate 4-inch curved base of our triangle.
• From that bottom point, we go back up towards the right, aiming again for an approximate 4-inch triangle base at the top. And so on.

Aim to get around 4-5 diagonals so that you get roughly 5-6 triangles.

Open them out and you will have 10-12 triangles from your sheet. You’ll have to cut some in half where your fold was.

Whilst you roll each sigara, cover the rest of your triangles with a plastic bag or clean, damp cloth to prevent them drying out.

Rolling Your Sigara Börek

In Turkish ‘sigara’ means cigarette. A cheese roll resembles a short fat cigar in shape, hence its name, ‘cigarette pastry.’

There have been suggestions of late that it ought to be called kalem böreği (pen/pencil pastry) but whether this will catch on or not, who knows?

Some börekçi places have started to use the term.

In seaside resorts, you’re more likely to see ‘cheese rolls’ on your menu, anyway.

And creating your cheese rolls is easy…

• On a large, flat surface, you place your first triangle of yufka, pointed end away from you. We add a heaped teaspoonful of börek cheese filling to the wide bottom edge and spread it into a thin line, leaving a small gap either side.
• Beat your egg in a small bowl. Then we brush the yufka with egg and start to roll.
• As with paçanga böreği, we fold the flat end over the top of the cheese, fold in the edges and brush the pointed end with egg mixture.
• Now it’s just a case of continuing to roll upwards until you get to the top.

That’s The First Sigara Böreği (Cheese Roll) Done

We need to keep going now, creating each sigara böreği until we’ve used up our remaining yufka and cheese mixture.

3 sheets of yufka with 300 grams of börek cheese will make roughly 30 individual sigara.

It depends how many triangles you make from each sheet and how much filling you want in each of your cheese rolls.

Mmm, Time To Eat Our Sigara Böreği

If you want to be healthy, you can individually brush each sigara with a bit of oil or egg and bake them in the oven as I’ve done with the previous börek recipes.

However, sigara are usually deep-fried and we only have them a couple of times a year so we tend to deep fry them as a treat.

Deep fry your sigara in batches in a couple of inches of vegetable oil or sunflower oil – they only take 3-4 minutes.

When the pastry has turned golden brown, remove them from the pan and place on kitchen paper towel to collect excess oil for a minute or so.

Serve your hot, crispy, spicy sigara böreği to your friends at your next gathering – they’ll love it!

Cheese rolls are a definite winner whether they are an appetiser on their own, part of your meze table as crisp, crunchy finger food or even part of your Turkish breakfast.

A delicious treat whatever the occasion!

Sigara Böreği – FAQs

How To Make Sigara Böreği

Read Next: Our list of Turkish recipes is growing by the day…

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