Blah blah cycling – today we watched burek being made! Burek is a savory pastry, usually baked in a round dish and sliced like a pizza, filled with sir (cheese) or meat or krompir (potatoes). It’s fueled much of our cycling since we got to the Balkans, and sometimes is in fact more interesting than some of the cycling, so today’s post is mostly about that.
We stopped for lunch at a bakery and sat to eat our burek and yogurt under the shade on the stoop of the bakery’s workspace, which neighbored the shop. I had noticed dough resting out as we had walked in, and as we finished I looked behind me and saw a man had approached the doughs and was starting to shape them. He saw my excitement, and waved me over to watch.
He first spread a thick layer of fat on the work surface. I knew it was some kind of lard based on the resultant pastry, and the man confirmed it was pork fat when we asked, but this wouldn’t be universal in more Muslim-predominant bakeries. He then pats a disk into the fat, and then throws it in the air (like a pizza chef cartoon), until it’s more than a meter square and transparent, with no holes, hinting that more fat was an input ingredient in the dough. Laying this out, he first folded the sheet like an envelope, and pulled away the thicker edges of the dough. More folds, with pinches to create holes so no enormous air pockets remain.
On the folded dough, he spread cheese and folded again, and then set this denser disk aside and resumed with the wide sheets, then nesting the first cheese-spread dough inside the others, removing edges of all layers. The corners of the square got tucked in, and the whole thing went into a round metal baking pan.
We couldn’t chat much due to Philipp’s and my poor Serbian skills, but we managed to convey we were from Switzerland, and he managed to convey either that Switzerland was expensive or that we have a lot of money.
We next watched as he made a “pizza” burek, with layers of lunchmeat, cheese, and tomato sauce. He also showed us the meat and potato fillings when we asked what the full set of variants was.
He last made a rolled version, spreading the cheese onto only one edge of the initial disk of dough, and rolling it toward himself and then into a spiral and into the same metal baking disk.
It’d be hard for him to be happier than I was about the interaction, but he had seemed quite proud to share his work, or at least have a distraction from it. We noticed a community picnic of sorts as we left town that he’d be missing, so at least I hope we gave him something to laugh about while missing the event.
Having gotten our fill of unpaved roads on the morning section leaving Belgrade, we opted for the paved option the rest of the way to Kovin, saving us 10K overall and 10K of riding on unpaved roads next to the river. The final stretch was hot and flat, with evidence of large-scale agriculture in a Pioneer-branded sunflower experiment field, and signs for one winery and a tourbus advertising wine tours in German.
Other highlights were leaving the posh hotel in Belgrade via the mall in full bike regalia (an offense for which we had been stopped on the way in, though likely looked worse for wear at the end of the ride) and catching our first Eurovelo 6 sign just across the hectic bridge sprint out of Belgrade north. We’re also sporting some new tape on the handlebars, and me a new, much lighter and better-fitting helmet, thanks to some rest-day shopping and bike maintenance.
While the surfaces were rough the route was exceptionally signed, save one section where someone had bent the sign to point in the wrong direction, but we righted ourselves and the sign for future cyclists. The Eurovelo 6 is “planned” all the way to the Black Sea, but only “signed” until Vidin, so we’ll enjoy them, or at least the correctly-oriented ones, while we can!
Arrived, hot and happy for the short and tasty day, at 3:30PM.
Total distance/elevation to date: 4931km/41’149m
Rest days: 18
Route and Stats
Relive Video
The 1948 Tour 
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