For today’s recipe, we made a quick pastry cake with colorful veggies that’s just perfect for a healthy weeknight family meal. We took inspiration from the classic Cretan boureki filo cake, but we made it 100% dairy free and vegan with tofu instead of crumbled feta. Let us show you how it’s done!
The great thing about this recipe is that you don’t even have to spend time cooking the fillings. Instead, just slice the potatoes and zucchini, crumble the tofu, and assemble the cake. job done! Then let the oven do the rest and get ready to enjoy this glorious boureki.
In case you are not familiar with the word boureki, it is a broad term referring to a family of baked phyllo pastries. Boureki is the Greek version of Börekthe Turk Yufka (filo pastry) pastries. But borek recipes are not limited to Greece and Turkey; You can also find them under the name of Bourekas, Boregor brerek in Israel, Armenia, Serbia and Slovenia, just to name a few.
Common fillings in these filo pies are meat, cheese, vegetables, and potatoes, but sweet ones like custard are also available. In Greece, there is a special type of boureki that can be found in the local cuisine of Chania, Crete. It consists of layers of zucchini and potatoes, garnished with mint and mizithraa local crumbly cheese similar to feta.
In our recipe, we kept the Cretan boureki base ingredients like filo leaves, chopped mint, zucchini and extra virgin olive oil, but we swapped white potatoes for sweet potatoes and cheese for tofu. We chose sweet potatoes as we’ve seen some winter variations of boureki made with pumpkin instead of potatoes. This way we got the same gorgeous orange color while still retaining the taste and texture of potatoes – it’s a win-win!
Firm tofu was our top choice for this vegan recipe as we used it in our previous Greek Mushroom Pie. But this time we marinated it with lemon juice, garlic and nutritional yeast to make it faster and without cooking. Thanks to tofu, each slice has plenty of it vegetable proteinswhich combined with fibers from the vegetables And unsaturated fats from olive oil Make this Greek Cake a balanced meal that will make everyone happy!