Bulgaria's best-loved pastry: thin sheets of dough layered or coiled around eggs, yogurt and white brined cheese — breakfast on any day, and a bearer of fortunes at New Year.
A pastry for every morning
Banitsa is made from very thin sheets of dough, today usually ready-made filo, brushed with butter or oil and layered, folded or rolled around a filling. The classic filling is crumbled sirene, a salty white brined cheese similar to feta, beaten together with eggs and yogurt.
It is one of the most common breakfasts in Bulgaria, sold warm by the slice from bakeries and street kiosks. The traditional drink alongside it is boza, a thick, mildly fermented grain drink; ayran, the salted yogurt drink, or a glass of plain yogurt are just as usual.
Shapes vary. The simplest is a tray of layered sheets cut into squares; the showier vita banitsa, whose name means twisted, is made by rolling filled sheets into long tubes and coiling them into a spiral in a round pan.
Fortunes at New Year
On New Year's Eve many Bulgarian families bake a special banitsa with small wishes hidden between the layers: slips of paper promising health, love, travel or success, sometimes wrapped in foil, and sometimes a coin. When the pastry is cut, the fortune in each person's piece is read aloud as a forecast for the year ahead.
Sweet versions exist too. Tikvenik, filled with grated pumpkin, walnuts, sugar and cinnamon, is a traditional dish of the meatless Christmas Eve table, and apple or milk-based fillings are common in home cooking.
Telling it apart from its neighbours
Pastries made from thin dough sheets are found throughout the lands of the former Ottoman Empire: börek in Turkey, burek across the former Yugoslavia, tiropita in Greece. Banitsa belongs to the same family.
What marks the Bulgarian version is its soft, almost custard-like filling of eggs and yogurt bound with sirene, which makes it moister and richer than a crisp, meat-filled burek. In the game, a guess anywhere in the eastern Balkans will land close, but Bulgaria is the classic answer.
