What Is a Beerock, And How Did It Get To Fresno? or How Did Fresno Cooks Corrupt the Bierock??

I was born and raised in Fresno, California, the raisin capital of the world. I loved Fresno. I especially loved the summers. While most adults would spend countless hours inside their homes cooled by the swamp coolers, I spent my childhood summers outside playing and exploring, clad only in shorts and t-shirts and always...always... barefoot.

Many of my most cherished childhood food experiences were in Fresno. When I was in second grade, I ate my first loquats from a tree that grew between the apartment buildings where we lived. Later we moved to a house in a more rural neighborhood directly across a one-lane asphalt road from a large fig orchard. In late summer, after the figs had ripened and before the rancher harvested the trees, my mother would send me across the street to pick bags of figs and bring them back to the house where she would make homemade fig jam. I knew it was stealing and I was terrified of being caught, but we'd eat that wonderful fig jam on toast for weeks. My dad had a large garden in the backyard of that house and my mom would make sweet tomato preserves dotted with candied lemon peel from the tomatoes he grew there. At family gatherings, my aunt Sally taught me how to quickly peel a hard boiled egg. My maternal grandmother taught me to make the best potato salad I've ever eaten. And, for Thanksgiving and Christmas I would fill countless stalks of celery with softened cream cheese.

Fresno was where my mother first made and I first tasted Beerocks, wonderful individual beef and cabbage pies, seasoned with lots of black pepper and wrapped in a thin yeast dough. They are spicy and delicious, but a common version of the more complicated meat-filled pocket pastry that arrived in the 1870's with German-Russian settlers. Their pastries were made from braised beef that was coarsely ground and mixed with cabbage and onions and wrapped in a handmade yeast dough. My mother's version was made with hamburger and boxed hot roll mix.

This recipe makes 12 stuffed pockets.

Betty's Beerocks
by Terri Powers adapted from my mom's recipe

2-1/2 lbs. ground beef
1 large head cabbage, cored and coarsely chopped
2 large onions, coarsely chopped
2 - 3 tablespoons ground black pepper
2 teaspoons salt
1 box Pillsbury Hot Roll Mix

Prepare the hot roll mix according to the directions on the box. While dough is rising to twice it's size, prepare the filling.


Put the ground beef in a large frying pan or pot and cook thoroughly on medium high heat, breaking the meat up as it cooks into the consistency of the meat filling for tacos. Add the chopped onions and cook until the onions are almost transparent. Add the cabbage and cook until it is almost soft, but still retains a somewhat firm texture (you don't want it to be mushy), stirring frequently until the meat, onions and cabbage are well mixed. Add the salt, then begin adding the pepper. Taste the mixture after you have added 2 tablespoons. The mixture should have a distinctly peppery flavor. Add more pepper as needed. Set aside and allow to cool slightly.


Preheat oven to 375ºF. Punch down the dough and divide into 12 equal pieces. Roll out each piece into a circle about 8 inches across.

For each pocket, pile several spoons full of the filling on one half of the dough circle.


Lift the remaining half of the dough over the filling and seal the dough all the way around the half circle.


Place the pockets on a large cookie sheet (you probably will need two cookie sheets) lightly dusted with corn meal. Bake in the preheated oven for about 35 minutes or until golden brown.

These freeze extremely well.