Boreks, a family of Middle Eastern pastries, are the marquee offerings at Woodbridge bakery/eatery Crunch CT: sliceable coils of flaky browned crust the size of a lunch plate, displayed in baskets under the counter and labeled according to what’s inside—potato, braised mushroom, spinach and feta, three cheese, chocolate. “My family made [boreks] at home. It was a traditional food for us,” says owner Liam Shemi, who shuttles between the display case and the kitchen, always in the process of making more.
Shemi takes me into that kitchen, where his boreks take shape. “This is basically like a four-step dough,” he explains. “First, we make the balls to create tension.” Smooth mounds of dough have been waiting on joined steel tables for about an hour to firm up. There are nearly a hundred of them in tidy rows and columns, and Shemi’s baking partner Hunter Duff is adding more, putting gobs of dough on the scale, then hand-forming them.
A short time later, Duff moves to the other end of the table for the second step. He halves the mounds with a dough scraper, hand-presses the twin halves flat, then tops one half with a sizable dollop of butter. “It took us a while to dial in how much butter,” Duff says, pointing his scoop at the cafeteria-sized supply tray holding a slowly retreating glacier of butter. “We tried a lot of different amounts and we ended up with a heaping spoon of this measurement.” He gives me a closer look at his butter scoop, which looks to be at least a tablespoon and a half.
Shemi points out that borek dough is laminated like this by definition, but often with other things. “Most boreks nowadays—up to 99 percent—are made with margarine. Christian Balkan countries use lard as the laminating fat. And Muslim countries use butter, but the main thing is, with the rise of industry, everyone switched to palm oil, hydrogenated fat.”
“Which would cut out, like, a quarter of the price,” Shemi adds, implying that he nevertheless intends to keep buying butter.
Shemi’s family’s relationship with the borek goes back to the 15th century, when Jews fled the Spanish Inquisition and settled in Turkey at the invitation of Sultan Bayezid II. The port city of Izmir is said to be where the first borek was baked. “So that’s why,” says Shemi, “you see a lot of overlapping with baklava, spanakopita, all sorts of Greek pastries and also Turkish ones.” Shemi learned to bake boreks from his grandmother, who had learned it from her mother. He and his parents emigrated to San Francisco in 2015, when he was in his teens.
Variations of borek likewise traveled, clockwise around the Mediterranean, taking on etymological and executional variations over the millennia. Duff had himself traveled extensively in the Middle East, and recalls the boreks he ate there. “In Jordan, a lot of meat borek. Lamb mostly. In Egypt, it was pretty similar to here, in terms of cheese, usually. Potato. In Turkey, also meat, and a lot of potato. In Israel, they’re usually a triangle, like that kind of shape”—he makes the shape of a slice of pizza with gloved, oiled hands—“and they’re much smaller. And it’s much more of a gas station food in Israel. In Jordan, it’s a bit more of a traditional lunch, dinner. And that’s the vibe we’re going for.”
The fillings, for all their variability, have to complement the dough. They have to provide the hearty softness and flavor after the eponymous crunch of the pastry, but without jeopardizing that crunch.
In another room, Shemi is stirring what looks like a chunky soup in a brazier. It’s simmering in the lowest third of the massive aluminum pot, but it had once filled it to the brim. “We sauteed up some onions,” Shemi explains. “We wash fresh mushrooms, break them down coarsely. Add them in. Add salt. That will extrude all the water. Then it’s not going to be soggy inside the dough. Once all the water is leached out of the mushrooms, we strain it, get out all the water, then we put it back in the pot. When it’s dry, we add our seasoning”—in this case, curry. “Then we cool it down and it’s ready to use as a filling.” The curry Mushroom borek, Shemi notes, is his wife’s favorite.
But Shemi is also always dreaming up new potential favorites. “We do a lot of fusion here. Like, just today, I said, ‘Oh, I should make a [plant-based] cheeseburger one for Fourth of July… We do things like apple filling. We do sweet. We do savory. We did for the Super Bowl, like, a refried bean burrito filling. We did for Chinese New Year an egg roll filling.”
Shemi became a professional in polyglot San Francisco, after high school internships in what included a Michelin-rated Italian restaurant. He effectively did a lot of fusion. Then, determined to bring his own boreks to the Bay Area, he apprenticed at bakeries in Istanbul, returning to Turkey not for lessons in borek purity but lessons in borek technology. “So instead of putting a pot on the stove, they have a thing that hooks up to the gas. And it just tilts over. That’s what they use in the football stadium and that type of thing to feed hundreds of people.”
Back in San Francisco, Shemi equipped himself to feed hundreds of people by renting space in a club kitchen, then selling his boreks at farmer’s markets and online. In 2024, he married a Connecticut native and moved his operation here. Ironically, now in his first fully appointed commercial-class kitchen, making boreks at commercial scale is still a matter of making them by hand.
In a third room, Shemi has a potato and caramelized onion filling on a kitchen scale and a round of laminated dough, which he stretches out in six directions. The resulting thin sheet is the size of a bath mat, a bit of it draped by design over the lip of the table. He then forms precisely 185 grams of filling into a long, straight mound across the dough. The draped bit of dough is delicately hauled up over the filling, and the sheet is then rolled into an equally long cylinder. “And then you get the snake,” Shemi says, brandishing the snake, “and then you can make any shape.” He then tidily coils the dough snake into an oval, with a sleight of hand that suggests a magician making balloon animals. The boreks, five to a tray, already have the shape they will have when they’re brought out of the oven.
“I can make it look easy, but it’s not,” he says, drawing another laminated dough into his workspace. “The temperature really has to be just right because if it’s too warm, in one stretch, it will resist, and if it’s too cold, then it will rip because the butter’s going to be cold in the center.”
The hand-shaping of dough—not to mention the daily operation of a business—had him working 18-hour days after he opened in 2024. “He was actually doing this by himself for about a year,” Duff says. “And his parents and family had an intervention, and told him, ‘You can’t be here 18 hours a day. You have to get some help.’”
Duff’s arrival was fortuitous. Against all odds, he, a Tennessee native, was already intricately familiar with boreks, and he and Shemi now finish each other’s thoughts about them. “The thing we’re making is special and made with a lot of love and a lot of sweat,” Duff says.
“Flour, water, salt,” Shemi says about the raw dough he’s working. “And that’s it. ... It speaks for itself.”
“But,” Duff says, “that’s the biggest hurdle that we face is: How do people taste it for the first time?”
Shemi nods. “That’s our biggest challenge.”
The pair haven’t stopped pressing and rolling dough while conversing. They have the shop to supply and also the farmer’s markets they’ll be visiting throughout the week. “We have a farmer’s market in White Plains on Wednesdays, which theoretically should be about an hour drive, roughly,” Duff says. “But since the market starts at eight o’clock, we have to be awake and ready to go at about five.” Farmer’s markets are ideal ambassadorships for a new delicacy; customers can see and try it before they have a chance to balk at its unfamiliar name. “Usually,” Duff says, “we sell out very, very quickly.”
I suggest that maybe this would enable them to call it a day early and take a well-earned break from the kitchen. Duff shakes his head. From White Plains, they’ll be returning to the shop to make more boreks—more flour, water and salt, more butter, more savory and sweet fillings and more sweat and love.
Written by David Zukowski. Images 1 and 3 photographed by Dan Mims. Image 2, featuring Hunter Duff, and images 4 and 5, featuring Liam Shemi, photographed by David Zukowski.
