Baklava

Baklava


Baklava is a Turkish sweet dish made with rich filo (fillo/phyllo) pastry and dry fruits and nuts typically. The filo pastry is made using all purpose flour, water and oil. It is quite a time consuming process and also needs a lot of patience because the dough has to be rolled to paper thin layers and tears are to be avoided. As for me, I would much rather prefer to buy readymade filo pastry from the supermarket fridge because I seldom use it and am ok with the little preservative that they add. If it was a regular in my kitchen, I would make it at home. Hopefully, sometime soon I will post another baklava recipe with homemade pastry. I used sugar syrup although some use honey syrup. Again, when I get to try honey syrup, I will post it. The quantity mentioned makes 16 pieces using about 8 filo sheets. You could use some dry fruits in the stuffing, I stuck to nuts. I liked the baklava recipe from Manjula’s kitchen and adapted the same.

8 filo pastry sheets
1/3 cup walnuts
½ cup almonds
¼ cup sugar (I mixed brown and white)
1/3 cup melted butter
Pistachio slithers for garnish

For syrup
1/3 cup sugar
2/3 cup water
Pinch of cardamom powder
1 teaspoon lime juice

Coarsely grind the nuts and mix with the sugar

Take two sheets of filo pastry together and apply butter then leave an inch gap from the shorter edge and spoon some filling along that side. A pastry brush would be helpful to apply butter evenly but mine had become hard for some reason so I used my best tool, hand

Roll the pastry twice and apply butter again

Roll again and apply butter. Repeat until you reach the middle of the sheet and now add more filling. Again roll and apply butter

Keeping the edge below, place the roll on a greased baking tray and apply butter

Repeat process until all sheets and filling are used

  Cut each roll into about 4 pieces and butter again

Bake in preheated oven at 180degC for 20 minutes (until it turns light brown)

For syrup:

Dissolve the sugar in the water and boil

Simmer until it reduces to about half a cup and is sticky. Add cardamom powder and once flame is turned off add the lime juice (this is to prevent crystallisation of sugar)

Let it cool and then poor over the baklava and garnish with chopped nuts like pista and serve at room temperature