With cheese, meat or pizza, every third person who enters a bakery buys a burek. With a cup of yogurt, up to 120 denars should be set aside for one quarter. Bakers say that the favorite is the one with meat, but there is also a "dead race" with the one with cheese. Young people also prefer other types, with hot pepper, with steak, or with zdenka and olives. Flavors are not discussed when it comes to this traditional breakfast, the bakers claim.

But recently, apart from fresh burek, the Macedonian market is increasingly filled with various frozen pies, pizzas, rolls, croissants, and even pretzels originating from the region, but also from the EU countries. Their prices are far cheaper than the fresh offer, so it happens that a burek pie costs as much as a quarter with yogurt bought in a bakery. Although there is no precise data on the quantities of these frozen doughs, the Customs Administration of Macedonia confirms the knowledge of "Sloboden Pechat" about their increased import.

- Regarding the issue of importing frozen products from the food and confectionery industry, including the products you are asking about, we inform you that in Macedonia such products are imported mostly from Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Turkey, as well as in a smaller quantity from Switzerland , Germany, Spain, France - specified by the Customs.

And Goran Gjorgjievski, president of the Chamber of Agriculture at SSK and owner of the "Special" chain of bakeries, confirms for our newspaper that Macedonian citizens "don't like homemade burek, so we have to import it."

- Your remark that there is an increased import of frozen bakery products is a good one. Our colleagues from the region have production overproduction, so they offer lower export prices. Such products from the region enter with "0" duty due to free trade and after paying VAT, it pays them to sell them far cheaper than the products offered in our bakeries. This is possible through the great support not only in the neighboring countries, but also in the EU, where they receive not only subsidies to export, but also help in materials or raw materials (flour or cooking oil) from the commodity reserves there. We are talking about huge industrial facilities, which have modern machines and, most importantly, adequate staff, which is the most painful point for us - explains Gjorgjievski.

He is determined that instead of alleviating the workforce problem in the bakery industry with "Open Balkan", many experienced bakers left the country.
Experts say that there is very little interest among young people to work as bakers or bakers, and they are even less interested in opening their own bakeries. The average age of employees in the bakery industry is increasing daily and has already reached 60 years, and retired bakers are often re-employed.

The owners of some Skopje bakeries say that it is even worse that most of the processes in the bakery industry cannot be automated to compensate for the lack of staff. In the large bakery industry, the biggest shortages are meat-makers, dough-formers and bakers, and even bread-spreaders, so high-paying ads are constantly open. In the small and micro-bakery industry, entrepreneurs have a problem finding bakers and bakers.

Previous analyzes of the Chamber of Commerce showed that there is a huge hole for qualified workers, and as Natasa Janevska, an expert in SKSM, pointed out last year, they will support some of their members through retraining and upskilling for the required skills.

The word "bur" means "to bend, bend, bend" which is associated with the bending of bark

Burek originated in Turkey, but it is believed that Turks still made this dish in their homeland in Central Asia. Etymologically, it is related to the Turkish root "bur" - which means "bends, bends, bends", which is also associated with the folding of bark.

With their conquests, the Turks spread the burek throughout the Middle East and the Balkans, so the Arab Bedouins also started making burek, and it was also taken over by the Sephardic Jews, who settled in large numbers in the Ottoman Empire after the Christians expelled them from Spain. In this huge area, the burek is filled with a variety of fillings – from the usual meat, cheese, spinach, to more unusual ones, such as sauerkraut, chickpeas, tuna – and there is also an empty burek.

In Skopje, making burek has a great tradition. Although it should be taken into account that the appearance and ingredients of burek, as we know them today, are from a relatively recent period. At first, the bakers and simitchi sold the burek, and then special burek shops were opened, wrote the chronicler Danilo Kocevski.