Bonus Baklava

Hello everyone! I am back baking again in the kitchen. Since the project ended I have only baked some snickerdoodles for my grandpa, and I am ready to start a new project. Today, Xochi, my wonderful photographer, and I are baking together. This is her grandparents' baklava recipe, and she loves to make it.

Baklava began with the Assyrians around the 8th century A.C. It was different back then than it is today. The earliest baklava was just bread dough with walnuts in the middle drizzled with honey. Baklava was originally only made on special occasions, and only the rich could afford to have it made for them. Greek seamen traveled to Mesopotamia and took back the baklava recipe to Athens with them. The Greeks changed the recipe. They made leaf-like sheets of dough ("phyllo") instead of bread dough to make it flakier and more like the recipe that I have made today.

This recipe took awhile to make with all of the preparations, but it was worth it. This baklava is absolutely amazing, and all of the steps to make it were really fun! I would recommend setting aside an entire day to make this.


For the filling:

2.5 # medium chopped English walnuts ( ~10 Cups)
1 cup powdered sugar
2 pound, # 4 phyllo dough, thawed according to instructions on package
2 # butter,( render it, and use melted at nearly room temperature)

For the syrup:

1/2 cup honey
2 cups water
4 cups sugar
2 cinnamon sticks
2 tsp. lemon juice

Use a 12" x 17" inch pan

Prepare in advance

Syrup

Prepare the syrup in advance so that it is at room temperature when the baklava is removed from the oven. We pour the cold syrup on the hot baklava. ( Other recipes call for pouring hot syrup on cold baklava)

Combine the ingredients for the syrup. Stir well and bring to a boil over a medium flame. Boil until temperature is 225 degrees F. Cover and let cool to room temperature.

Walnuts

Use a food processor to chop the walnuts into ~ ¼ " pieces: use several cups of walnuts at a time, pulse until chopped to the size you like, but never pasty or powdery; try approximately 10 quick pulses.

Mix in the 1 cup of powdered sugar and set aside.

Butter

Render 2 lbs. of butter. The following is from Ochef at http://www.ochef.com/540.htm

I use the second method and have use the fine meshed strainer without the cheesecloth. I'm sure it would be easier with the cheesecloth. Just be careful to heat at the lowest possible flame and do not let the milk solids get darker than golden brown.

"Clarified butter is butter that has had the milk solids and water removed. One advantage of clarified butter is that it has a much higher smoke point, so you can cook with it at higher temperatures without it browning and burning. Also, without the milk solids, clarified butter can be kept for much longer without going rancid.

It is very easy to make. Melt the butter slowly. Let it sit for a bit to separate. Skim off the foam that rises to the top, and gently pour the butter off of the milk solids, which have settled to the bottom. A stick (8 tablespoons) of butter will produce about 6 tablespoons of clarified butter.

Another method is to simmer the butter in a saucepan until the mixture separates. After the water has evaporated, the milk solids will begin to fry in the clear butterfat. When they begin to turn golden, remove the pan from the heat and pour the butter through a fine strainer lined with damp cheesecloth into a heatproof container. If the cheesecloth is damp, all the butterfat will pass through, otherwise some will be absorbed by the cloth. This method is a little fussier, but produces a clearer result".

Another method described in the book "Sahtein", which I have not tried, may also work well.

Melt 2 lbs.butter at low heat in a pot (~ 1-Qt size.) Add about ¼ to ½ cup coarse Burghul that has been washed and squeezed dry. Cook on low-heat until foaming ceases. Skim any residual foam from top of butter. When butter is clear, remove from heat and cool before decanting the clear golden butter. Be careful to prevent entry of any of the salty residue or Burghul.

Heat the oven to 400 degrees F.

Assembling the Baklava

The phyllo comes in 1# packages containing ~20 sheets, approximately 12" x 17". They are frozen and must be defrosted in the refrigerator overnight. On the next day, remove the phyllo package 5 hours before assembly time. Before opening the package lay a cloth towel such as used for drying dishes and cover it with a layer of wax paper. Have ready a dry towel and a damp towel. Open the package and unfold the phyllo on to the wax paper. Immediately cover with the dry towel and then the damp towel. The phyllo sheets are very delicate and dry quickly, so they must be kept covered as you layer and butter them in the baking pan.

Brush the bottom and sides of the baking pan with the melted and cool butter. (We use a 4-inch paint brush) Lay down a phyllo sheet and brush with butter. Repeat this until you have laid down the 20 sheets from the package. Uniformly distribute the chopped nuts atop the 20 phyllo layers, and sprinkle with some of the melted butter to help hold the next phyllo sheet. I think it would work better if you butter the next phyllo sheet and put the buttered side down on the nut surface. You can then butter the top side and repeat the assembly of the remaining phyllo sheets.

Use a table knife or spatula to carefully press the phyllo edges at the side of the pan and use a sharp knife to remove any layers that maybe over the edge of the pan at the corners, which could occur of the pan has rounded corners. Butter the tope sheet generously

Use a sharp knife to cut the cake into diamond shapes. First make parallel cuts along the length of the pan spaced about one inch apart or more depending on how large you want the diamond pieces to be. Repeat with a set of cuts at a diagonal. You can space them to adjust to the size you elect.

Place the pan in the 400 degree oven and immediately reduce the temperature setting to 300 degrees. Check in 1 hour by carefully prying at the edge to expose some of the bottom layers. They should be golden brown when done.

Remove from oven and carefully pour on the cold syrup. Distribute it uniformly over the diamond rows, atop the diamonds so that it flows into the cuts and and edges of the pan..

The number of pieces that you get obviously depends on the spacing used when the cake was cut. In the pan that we use, a spacing of about I" will produce 80 to 90 pieces.

You can adjust the recipe for smaller pans. Simply cut the phyllo roll to a size to fit your pan before beginning the assembly. For example you could use just one package of the phyllo for a 9 x 12 x2" pan.

As an alternate, some people make a triple layer of nuts by distributing the nuts between 10 layers of phyllo sheets rather than the 20 that we use.