On 1st of March, I threw a party: my housewarming party for my 5. apartment in Helsinki. It was an opportunity to be with friends but the other great thing was preparing for the party, aka cooking the whole Friday long!

This salty pastry was the first thing I cooked for the night. I googled in Turkish a few recipes about salty pastries and mixed the ideas a bit. This kind of salty pastries are very common in Turkish cuisine, you can make them in many different forms, with many different fillings, using different types of dough or phyllo dough. I used puff dough. I used sanakirja, wikipedia and a little bit of creativity to find what puff dough means in Finnish – it’s voitaikina-levyjä and the brand is Myllyn Paras (http://www.myllynparas.fi/portal/suomi/kuluttajat/tuotteet/pakastetaikinat/voitaikinalevyt/). You can find it all the regular markets I guess – I bought it from K-market in Kamppi.

So let’s get started with the ingredients:

10 pieces of puff dough (1 voitaikina-levyjä package)
3 small sausages (I used Turkish sausage which I’ll explain more below)
3 banana peppers (if you cannot find that any green pepper would do)
2 table spoons of tomato puree
1 table spoon of olive oil
1 egg yolk

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1. First, let’s prepare the filling.

a. As I wrote above, I used Turkish sausages for this pastry, well only because it is a more familiar taste for me. But any kind of sausage you like would do. If you want to try mine exactly, you can find the sausage in Alanya Market in Itäkeskus (http://www.alanyaorientalmarket.fi/). Look for “Sölen Kahvaltilik Sosis”. It’s beef. Now, cut the sausages in small pieces – as small as you like.

b. Cut the peppers in small pieces as well. I made the sausages a bit bigger pieces than peppers but it’s up to you.

c. Pour olive oil in a pan and put the peppers first. Stir them well with oil, but hey, do NOT burn!! When they are cooked well enough, add the sausages and stir them together a bit more. Finally add the tomato puree and stir a few more minutes.

d. The sausages and the tomato puree that I used were already quite salty so I did not add any extra salt in the filling. But if your ingredients are not that salty, you can add a little bit salt while you are cooking them.

2. Now, the dough..

a. If you bought that same package of dough, you will see that there are 5 rectangular pieces inside. Cut each into 2 pieces, making 10 square pieces.

b. The dough is still a little too thick to make a roll so roll out to make them thinner and also a little larger so that it is easier to put the filling and roll.

c. When the dough pieces are ready, put some filling on it. Try to put it a little closer to the side as in the picture. Then roll!

d. Put each piece on the tray in a way that the end of each piece faces down – otherwise as they are being baked, they will open up.

e. Make a cut on each piece. Do NOT cut all the way down. Try to feel it with your knife – stop going deeper as soon as you feel you reach the filling. Put some egg yolk on the surface of each piece.

3. And baking!

a. Preheat the oven for about 3 minutes, to 180 degrees.

b. Put the pastry in the oven and bake it until the surface is roasted well enough. In my oven it took 20 minutes to reach that point. In your oven it may be longer / shorter so the best way is to watch what’s going on inside the oven.

Hope you like it!