Kiflis Bakery & Restaurant

Recently I came across fellow Akronite food blogger Kathy and her site called Carano's Cucina. In one of her more recent blogs, she details the discovery she made one day when she and her husband decided to stop at a local Cuyahoga Falls bakery just down the road from Kreiger's Market on Graham Road called Kiflis Bakery and Restaurant. What drew her in was a sign outside the building advertising fresh "burek". Keenly interested in what burek was, they stopped in to find out. As you can no doubt see from her blog entry, they had discovered someplace unique offering something unique.

Having driven by this intersection hundreds of times in my life, I was stunned to learn that this building housed a wonderful ethnic bakery that was offering up homemade and heartfelt goodies for the local community. They are located at 526 Graham Road, Cuyahoga Falls, OH 44123 and can be reached at 330-926-2123. There is currently no website, but as owner Mire Udovicic mentioned to me, he is currently having one designed for him. To make locating the building that much easier, the bakery is essentially on the corner of Graham Road, Bath Rd, and 8th Street.

Here is a view from the outside (notice the drive-thru service window on the left side of the building):


I was a concerned about the availability of fresh burek when I first pulled up because there wasn't a sign outside advertising the fact. Once inside the door though, a sign immediately to my right put me at ease:


And it turns out that I showed up on a good day. Not only was there cheese burek, but also beef, spinach and cheese, and apple. Burek can be either sweet or savory. Since Kiflis is both a bakery and a restaurant, I decided to take a look around at some of their offerings.

First up, the handwritten menu on the wall:


There are between 5 and 6 tables available to sit at and eat your meal. Given Kiflis's hours of operation, that would most likely be breakfast and lunch. They close at 5 pm during weekdays and on 3 pm on Saturdays. As you can see from the menu above, the most Mediterranean item on the menu would be the gyros. Everything else is mostly American style sandwiches.

Next up is a shot of one of the pastry cases that houses some of the burek available. All the burek is rolled in the same manner, so you can't really tell which type you have just by looking at the outside. Here we have spinach and cheese on the left and plain cheese on the right:


The cheese is a mixture of Feta cheese and American cottage cheese. The use of cottage cheese in this didn't really surprise me. I researched a Russian dish several years ago for a party I had catered and the recipe called for Sulguni (or Suliguni) cheese. The recipe noted that if I couldn't find that, a mixture of cottage cheese, Feta, and mozzarella cheese could be used in its place. The cottage cheese is used to add a nice softness and creaminess to the drier and more crumbly Feta.

In the next case over are some of their pastries that they offer by the slice:


Here you can see some of their cookies on the top shelf and the poppy seed and walnut strudels on the middle shelf.

Next up is a shot of several varieties of cookies that they offer. They generally fall into two categories, those with no jam (such as almond cookies) and those that do. I didn't get to try any of the cookies this time around, so a return trip is definitely in order!


And in the rack behind the cookies was shelf after shelf of strudel:


As with most small ethnic bakery / restaurants, Kiflis also offers some harder to locate ingredients in case you want to try and make these treats at home. While Kiflis doesn't have as large a grocery section as some other Akron ethnic stores I have visited, they did offer quite a variety of not-so-easy to find items. The prices also seemed quite reasonable.


On one of the walls by the grocery area, an article from 2001 from the local Cuyahoga Falls newspaper heralded the arrival of Mire and his wife and their new bakery:


I didn't actually taste anything at the store, but I did spend about twenty minutes talking with Mire and how he runs his store and decided to leave with tastes of four of his treats: a cheese burek, an apple burek, a slice of poppy seed strudel, and a slice of the walnut strudel. He assured me that they would be absolutely fine until later tonight.

First up, a shot of the two strudels, walnut on the left/bottom, poppy seed on the top/right:


While just a touch dry, the overall taste on both was exactly what I expected. They were sweet, but not too sweet. The dryness of the dough didn't particular bother me because I knew that a) I had asked for slices of strudel from an already cut whole strudel and b) I bought them at 1:30 pm and didn't try them until 9:30 pm later that day. The walnut filling had a wonderful nutty taste and combined well with the heady cinnamon spice. It was ground completely smooth so there wasn't any texture to it. The poppy seed was equally as good with that wonderful lemony citrus undertone to it. Both of these were excellent examples of a well done European strudel. You could definitely enjoy this in place of a nice coffeecake in the morning.

Mire pointed out that burek is traditionally a Turkish dish that he has given his own spin to. Literally. Traditionally burek was a layered type of pastry. Finding this method to be too time consuming to be profitable, he decided to do the version he offers today. Essentially they take handmade phyllo dough that they make on-site, layer a few sheets, place the filling along one end and roll it up sushi-style. Then they take the long filled pastry rope and wrap it around itself in a circular fashion. Brush with lots of butter, bake, and you get this:


Although you can't tell from the outside, this happened to be the apple burek. This is big enough for one hungry adult or could easily be split between two less hungry people. This is such a wonderful treat. The phyllo dough on the outside is so nice and tender and flaky. The filling was slightly sweetened, but not so much as to mask the natural apple taste. The filling had a nice integrity to it as you could still get the chunks of apples on the inside. Canned pie filling this was not! With just the right seasoning from cinnamon and sugar, this was a real winner.

The cheese burek was equally as good, although this was savory and not sweet. Feta by itself would've been too overpowering, too salty. The cottage cheese was used both as an extender as well as a way to cut the sharpness of the Feta. Just delicious. I ate both of these at room temperature and they were both absolutely outstanding. Mire indicated that you could gently reheat them if you chose to do so, but it really isn't necessary.

This is exactly the kind of place I love finding. Local ethnic mom and pop shop making wonderfully unique and delicious food that truly everyone can enjoy. I encourage you to stop in at Kiflis to meet Mire and his wife and try some of their truly tantalizing treats.

Who am I?

I can tell you what I am not: a full-time professional in the food industry. Have I worked in the food industry? Yes. Most of my high school jobs were as a line cook at various restaurants. I cater small to mid-sized parties every now and again. I actually worked in a local organic bakery for several months to get the feel for baking in a large volume production kitchen. Do I come from four years of tough training from the likes of Johnson & Wales or the CIA? Nope.

My interest in baking good bread comes from my intense desire to eat good bread. It is amazing to me that at it's most basic, bread consists of flour, water, yeast, and salt. And yet, pick up almost every single loaf of bread in a grocery store and there are a myriad of additional ingredients that have nothing to do with nutritional value and everything to do with extending shelf life and making the product cheaper to produce (such as high fructose corn syrup). Why is it that we take all of the nutritive value out of our flours through bleaching and bromation, only to have to add it back in through supplements?

I got serious about bread about four years ago when I decided that I was tired of putting bread that was devoid of nutrition into my body. What was I left with? In the typical grocery store, not much. Usually I had to start moving toward the organic options, but at those prices, I would be paying $3-$5 per loaf. So, I decided to start doing breads my way, at home, from scratch. I would then supplement with store bought bread when I was in a pinch. I started out with only basic knowledge and a couple of recipes I had left over from a failed experiment with a bread machine I had owned years earlier.

Recipe in hand, I started making sandwich bread first, honey whole wheat. The problem was that I didn't realize that there is a science to making bread. As much as I profess that bread is different from pastry in that it is a living thing for which you must make concessions, it is in fact also rooted in the same science of chemistry that drives the precision that pastry chefs use to get repeatable results. Sometimes there is a little more or a little less moisture in the air, sometimes the ambient temperature in the kitchen is a little warmer or a little cooler. All of these things affect the final loaf. But of course, when I started doing all of this, I didn't know any of these things.

So, some loaves came out light and airy. Some loaves, well, didn't.

It wasn't until I picked up the book The Breadbaker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart that my entire bread making approach just opened up. Mr. Reinhart brought the science of making bread to the table. And as any good engineer can tell you, it's all about numbers and the Scientific Method. Suddenly it dawned on me that maybe the reason my results weren't repeatable had more to do with the fact that my recipe was flawed, I wasn't measuring the ingredients properly, and my understanding of what exactly was going on in that little ball of dough was severely lacking.

Since then I have read many a book, taken many a class, given many a class, and worked for a brief stint at a bakery, all because I want to learn as much as I can about bread. Because if you are going to take the time to make bread from scratch, shouldn't you want to give it as much flavor and nutrition as you possibly can?