Brik (בריק) is a Tunisian fried parcel that became a fixture of Israeli eating through North African Jewish kitchens: a sheet of thin pastry folded around a filling and a whole egg, then deep-fried until the shell shatters. It is a sandwich by function more than by form, a hand-held package of starch around a savory center, and the angle is the egg. The yolk has to stay runny inside a shell that is fully crisp, which means the fry is a race: long enough to set the dough and the white, short enough that the yolk does not harden. Land it and the first bite cracks open into a flood of warm yolk; miss it and you have either a hard-cooked egg in greasy pastry or a raw, splitting parcel that leaks before it reaches the plate.
The build is precise and quick. The pastry, a paper-thin sheet such as malsouka or a similar leaf, is laid out and a filling is spooned onto one half: typically mashed potato seasoned with parsley, sometimes tuna, capers, harissa, or onion, kept to a low mound so it cooks through and leaves a well for the egg. A whole raw egg is cracked into that well, the pastry folded over into a triangle or half-moon and the edges pressed to seal so the yolk cannot escape. It goes straight into hot oil and is fried fast, turned once, until the shell is deep gold and brittle all over. It is lifted out, drained briefly, and eaten almost immediately, often folded in paper, with lemon to cut the fry. Good execution shows in a shell that is uniformly crisp and not oil-logged, a sealed seam that holds, and a yolk still liquid when it splits. Sloppy versions read at once: a pale soft wrapper, oil that has soaked into the dough, a burst seam from a bad seal or a wet filling, or an overcooked yolk that defeats the whole point.
It shifts mostly by what joins the egg. The plain potato-and-egg parcel is the baseline; tuna with capers, or harissa worked into the filling, pushes it sharper and spicier, and richer versions fold in cheese. The fold itself varies between a triangle and a rolled cigar shape, which changes the crust-to-filling ratio. A larger filled and fried turnover with no runny egg is a different preparation, closer to a fried pastry than to this, and deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here. The defining trait stays constant: a crisp shell, a sealed seam, and a yolk that runs.