Burekas Tzinonim (בורקס צנונים) is, in the bakery vernacular this catalog follows, the green-filled burekas: a flaky pastry built around cooked spinach, usually bound with a salty white cheese, sold from the same cases as its meat, cheese, and potato siblings. The angle is the same water problem that defines every leafy filling. Spinach carries a lot of liquid and gives it up in the oven, so this version asks the pastry to stay crisp against a filling that wants to make it soggy. When the greens are squeezed dry and the cheese is sharp, it is one of the more interesting burekas; when they are not, it is a wet, flat triangle with a deceptively golden top.
The build is pastry, a well-drained filling, fold, finish. The dough is the family's thin laminated sheet, brushed and stretched so it bakes into separate leaves. The filling is cooked spinach wrung out hard to remove its water, chopped and mixed with a brined white cheese, often feta or a Bulgarian style, plus onion and black pepper, sometimes a little egg to set it. That squeeze is the decisive step: spinach that goes in damp will weep through the base no matter how good the pastry. The filling is spooned on, folded into a triangle or coiled, sealed at the seam, egg-washed, and finished with sesame seeds. Done well, the layers shatter, the spinach is concentrated and savory, and the cheese carries enough salt to lift the greens without burying them. Done badly, the filling is watery and grey, the cheese is bland so the whole thing tastes of wet leaf, or the base has gone to paste from moisture the kitchen never cooked off.
Within this reading the variation is mostly in the cheese and the ratio. A sharper brined cheese makes a brighter, saltier pastry; a milder blend lets the spinach lead. Some bakeries push the greens hard with little cheese for an almost pure vegetable filling, while others lean cheesy so it sits closer to the cheese version, and that line is worth keeping clear rather than blurring. The standard street treatment, splitting the pastry and adding a hard-boiled egg, pickles, and a spoonful of tomato relish or s'chug, applies here too and is documented as its own form; the relish in particular cuts the iron-rich green well. The meat, cheese, potato, and mushroom fillings are the same pastry around a different center and each earns its own article rather than being folded in here. On its own terms, this version rewards one discipline above all: get the water out of the spinach, and the rest of the burekas can do its job.