The Slavic east and the Balkans · Volume 29, Bura, Smoke and the Ottoman Line
Flija
Albania
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 3 hours
- Researched
- 14 sources cited
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
Flija is documented by Albania's own National Register of Intangible Cultural Heritage, a genuinely strong source: a highland malësi dish, made for calendar feast days, memorial gatherings and as a gesture of hospitality, requiring sustained, often multi-generational family labour to build.
As tradition built it
Serves 6 to 8. 2 to 3 hours, largely hands-on.
Ingredients
- 500 g plain flour
- to a thin, pourable batter water and milk
- 4 eggs, divided between the batter and the liquid butter mixture
- 200 g butter, melted
Method
- Make a thin batter from the flour, water, milk and half the eggs.
- Make a separate liquid mixture from the melted butter and the remaining eggs.
- Set a domed lid, or an equivalent covered dome, over a bed of embers, and heat a shallow pan beneath it.
- Pour a thin layer of the liquid butter mixture into the pan, cover, and let it set briefly under the heat, a minute or two.
- Pour a thin layer of batter over the top, cover again, and let that set.
- Repeat, alternating liquid and batter layers, brushing each set layer with a little extra butter before the next is poured, until the ingredients are exhausted, roughly 2 to 3 hours total.
- The finished pie shows visible horizontal striations from the many individually set layers, and is cut into wedges to serve.
What a modern chef changes
The saç's radiant-dome logic, reached with a Big Green Egg instead.
Rung 4
Method
- Use a Big Green Egg with the lid closed and a plancha or griddle plate as the base, holding a steady, even radiant heat that a domestic oven, built for a different kind of heat entirely, cannot reproduce.
- Time each layer by colour rather than a fixed count of minutes, since the Egg's own heat will run slightly differently to an ember bed and the layers need to be judged, not merely timed.
- Brush each layer with browned butter rather than plain melted butter, adding a nuttiness the long layering process rewards.