The Levant and Anatolia · Volume 01, The Oil Coast, the Anchovy Coast and the Court Between Them

Laz Böreği

Name: Laz Böreği
Total time: 1 h
Yield: Serves 8
Cuisine: Istanbul, the Aegean and the Black Sea
Ingredients: enough to layer the dish, top and bottom yufka sheets, layered; as needed, for brushing butter, melted; 1 litre milk; 200 g sugar; 4 egg yolks; 2 tbsp cornstarch; 2 tbsp rice flour; a pinch a pinch of black pepper; as needed sugar syrup, prepared separately

The Black Sea coast, and, in Lazca, paponi

Laz böreği, layered pastry filled with a black pepper spiced custard: a cut square of golden layered pastry, its cross section showing a thick pale custard filling between crisp buttery sheets.

Illustration

Time: 1 hour

Researched: 20 sources cited

A sweet, custard-filled pastry, and this chapter's clearest example of a dish shared honestly across a modern border rather than owned by either side of it.

Not a savoury börek, despite the name; see the history section above for its Greek-named sibling, galaktoboureko, and this chapter's deliberate refusal to adjudicate which came first.

The Black Sea coast, and, in Lazca, paponi

In 2026, Turkish press reported a fresh dispute after Greek media presented galaktoboureko as straightforwardly Greek, prompting Turkish outlets to point out this is the same dessert known in Turkish as Laz böreği and in Lazca as paponi, a dispute that reportedly reached the Turkish parliament's own agenda. The name itself is a compound of Greek galakto (milk) and boureko, a Turkish and Ottoman loanword, börek, a detail Turkish commentary points out is routinely left out of the Greek framing. Given more than four centuries of Ottoman rule over Greek-speaking populations and a genuinely shared Pontic Black Sea food culture before 1923, this chapter treats the dish as a shared regional dessert with parallel names in three languages, not a case of either side stealing from the other, and names the contemporary nationalist framing on both sides as exactly that rather than adopting it.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Serves 8. About 1 hour.

Ingredients

enough to layer the dish, top and bottom yufka sheets, layered
as needed, for brushing butter, melted
1 litre milk
200 g sugar
4 egg yolks
2 tbsp cornstarch
2 tbsp rice flour
a pinch a pinch of black pepper
as needed sugar syrup, prepared separately

Method

Build the custard: whisk the milk, sugar, egg yolks, cornstarch and rice flour together, cook out over low heat, stirring constantly, until thick enough to hold a ribbon.
Stir in a pinch of black pepper, the detail several sources single out as what gives the dessert its real depth rather than plain sweetness.
Layer the yufka sheets with melted butter in a baking dish, pour in the custard, top with more buttered yufka.
Bake at 170°C for approximately 30 minutes, until golden.
Pour the prepared sugar syrup over the hot pastry as it comes out of the oven.

What a modern chef changes

The custard's texture and the pepper note protected, not smoothed over.

Method

Do not skip the black pepper. It is easy to treat as an error in a sweet recipe and omit; every source describing this dish well is explicit that it is the detail that makes it, not a mistake to correct.
Cook the custard properly to a full ribbon stage before layering, since an underset custard will weep into the pastry during baking and produce a soggy rather than a properly layered result.
Pour the syrup while the pastry is still hot from the oven, so it is properly absorbed rather than sitting on the surface.

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