> "Baklava is made by thinning the dough to a fine micro-degree, and by putting 10 or 11 layers on top of each other by hand," says Güllü. It is not a process conducive to automation.
Actually, that sounds incredibly conducive to automation... A quick search, shows people are already selling machines to do it.
I think most baklava comes from factories, and whichever ones don't taste so good, it's probably just because they didn't use the best/freshest ingredients.
Here in Greece (actually central Greece) houses traditionally make Baklava for the Christmas - new years eve period. It is considered a "holiday" treat.
Most people use almonds to fill it and ready-made pie-sheets (from the supermarket, these are common in Greece because people use them to make pies). It's not difficult to make but, because it needs a lot of almonds it has very expensive, that's why it's not usual to make it on other times.
If a multi-layered, crunchy, sweet dessert with filings of various nuts, and dipped in clarified butter, with a little salt to the mix is "boring", I'd love to know of a dessert that you consider 'interesting'.
Hmmm probably I had eaten that too many times as a kid so now as an adult I dislike it? Or maybe it's the way that people here make it? It all depends on the execution!
An interesting desert for me? Not really easy to answer, I guess I'm not into sweets very much ...
Every time I have tried baklava it was so overpoweringly sweet that I could not manage to finish even a tiny piece. The sugar/honey overwhelmed everything else. So count me as one that agrees with baklava being "boring".
Look up a south asian grocer for Soan Papdi, it's a similar sweet that's not too sugary (by south asian standards anyway) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soan_papdi
Here in Serbia, baklava is mostly too sweet for my taste. I prefer another Turkish dessert called tufahija, which is cooked apple with central part with seeds taken out and filled with grinded walnuts and honey, soaked in sugary water and topped with whipped cream.
My problem with most baklava to me is that all the subtlety and refinement you are talking about just gets lost is big old mess of "sweet". My general baklava experience is that the first bite is good, the second bite is enough and after the third bite I kind of wish I hadn't. It's like some people and chilli heat, once you pass a certain level, it doesn't matter how refined and complex the underlying dish is, all they can taste is 'hot'.
Interesting deserts to me manges to balance sweetness against acidity, tartness, bitterness and similar flavours to create more contrast and where the sweetness isn't the dominating taste experience.
True baklava is not boring. The one you describe is boring because it has no finesse. I’ve had it in Greece, and I make it at home, it’s just a sugar fix. True baklava is an experience. Most baklava in Turkey is bad too. The one mentioned in the article is pretty good but the bests are the other ones in Gaziantep. Something about the combination of worlds best pistachios and grass fed clarified butter. It is sublime. Michelin star level shit. Worth flying to Gaziantep for. Too bad it’s the butt of the world. I order from here [0] when I’m in Turkey. I think it’s the brother or cousin of the guy mentioned in the article. They fly it out the day it’s made. I think they send to some European cities too. It loses its amazing smell after a couple days, though so tough luck for other parts of the world.
The big problem with baklava is that it turns into a blob of solid glop unless you pay strict attention.
Everything has to be kept very "light". But, when you do, everything is on the verge of falling apart. It will not transport very far or last very long.
There’s a baklava place in SF called Baklava Story that is hands down the best baklava I have ever had and probably will ever will have. The owner, Tolgay, travels to Turkey each year to source pistachios and milk to make butter with from specific farms each year. With the residual milk from making clarified butter from the Turkish milk, he makes soap, and gives it to customers.
Every single one of his reviews on Google and yelp are 5 stars. I deeply admire folks that invest so much of their time into one craft (especially if it happens to be edible) to become the best
This is one of my retirement dreams. Not baklava, but take a food item that I cherish (I won't divulge which one!), and execute on it as well as I can possibly imagine, vertically integrating as much of the inputs as possible. I love his minimal waste approach with the auxiliary soap output.
Basically, the Unix philosophy applied to cuisine.
Moved to Vegas a few years ago and hadn’t met the neighbors ahead of time. Turns out they’re Turkish and their cousin brings us a full pan of homemade baklava once a quarter. Mixes the types up. Perfect neighbors! Also, Summerlin farmers market has a baklava seller that even makes Hawaiian Baklava with reduced pineapple syrup.
Don't say than, until you've had Lebannese baklava. Both the Turkish and Greek varieties are oversweet. Lebanese baklava on the other hand is finer, more refined and does not drip syrop.
I think the parent poster meant that the specific modern countries are fairly new, and before they were all part of the same entities. Greece and Turkey were both part of the Byzantine Empire for centuries, and later part of the successor Ottoman Empire - together with Syria - again for centuries. Separate "national" identities for those areas didn't really exist until the XIX century, when Greeks started agitating for independence from Ottoman rule.
Calling anything that came from before the 19th century a result of "Greek" culture makes things a bit murky, though. If, hypothetically, baklava was developed in what is now Istanbul, is it a result of Greek, Turkish, Byzantine, Roman, Persian, or Ottoman culture? The answer is that it's a silly question.
The Greek alphabet, sure, but Hagia Sophia? The one that was ordered to be built by a Roman emperor and consecrated by a Christian bishop from Antioch? I would describe it as Roman, Byzantine, or Ottoman before I would describe it as Greek.
Even so, we do have clear examples of Greek Culture, since practically the beginning of records, even if that culture has been influenced by other cultures over time (as most cultures are).
Even conquered peoples generally maintain their culture as the culture or sub-culture of whatever society they live in. The governments might fall, but the people's culture usually lives on.
I meant how both of its designers were Greek, and it was built in a majority-Greek city as an Eastern Orthodox church (which wasn't specifically Greek but was different from western Roman). I'm not sure about the emperor or the bishop, but they were born in Tauresium and Arabissos respectively, so I guess Thrace and Armenia Minor then.
When we're talking about 500 years ago and say "Greek," we aren't referring to the modern nations. It means the Greek people. But I think with food it's usually an unsolvable mystery which exact culture invented it or whatever.
The Ottoman Empire's own administration did categorize its peoples sorta based on religion and apply different laws to them. The millets were Muslims, Armenians, Greeks, Circassians, and more. These were meaningful designations at least because of how marriage tended to stay within the same religious sect. Besides that, I've heard the closest thing to a national identity back then was the nearest city, rather than the empire. The major cities in that region were ethnically diverse, so some of your culture specifically had to do with your city, while other aspects had to do with your ethnicity/religion.
In this case, baklava supposedly originated in Antep. I don't know what the ethnic makeup was like in the 1500s there, but I'd wager it was picked up by multiple cultures around the same time there (someone can prove me wrong if not). So if you really want to give "credit" to some people for it, I think Antep is the most correct answer, and I don't just mean PC.
I wouldn't really call past time Turkey a part of Byzantine Empire, Turks moved to Anatolia about a millenium ago with the Selcuks. Past time Turkey (before Anatolia) is more to the east.
Some countries are named for particular cultures which have existed for longer than a particular government using the name. For example, the current governing body of "France" was established 4 October 1958 [0]. But if you go to a French bakery you might buy a fresh croissant which dates to maybe 1839 [1]. Is that not still French even though the current republic is over a hundred years younger?
I love baklava, especially with pistachios and rosewater. They used to make some good stuff in a great kebab shop in North Kensington, London, called Fez Mangal. It's the kind of place that has photos of famous customers all over the wall, but kept prices at an affordable level.
The Balkans has a strong baklava tradition after centuries of Turkish occupation, but today virtually any confectionary shop, even the poshest, is going to use palm oil. You aren't getting the original recipe with butter or olive oil unless you do the whole painstaking process at home. I wonder if the same has become true in Turkey as well.
Baklava isn't really all that hard to make in your home kitchen if you use premade phyllo, available in almost every supermarket (in the US, anyway, although I also saw it in London and Germany). Then you can alter the fats and volatiles as much as you please. The hardest part, in this instance, is finding the precisely correct thawing time for the frozen phyllo. Too little, it is brittle and breaks instantly; too much, and it is sodden.
I typically like to make an all-butter version with walnuts and almonds, and a very tangy citrus-forward honey cinnamon syrup, with the citrus halves simmered in the syrup for many hours. Which, TIL, makes my baklava sort-of-Cypriot. I've also made piles of vegan baklava, replacing butter with shortening, for those vegans that don't accept honey as an animal product. I suppose bees aren't really "kept" so much as "employed".
I make my own, the pastry is available easily in the UK (sometimes not in stock everywhere, it isn't as common as other types of pastry). I buy refrigerated rather than frozen and have not had an issue with getting the warming-to-work-with timing OK.
Easy to make. A bit time consuming perhaps, but worth it. I've had mine "approved" by a colleague with Turkish family and a Greek orthodox grandmother, so it can't be bad!
Yes, homemade is the best. My mom makes it with honey and pecans making them sort-of-Texan. I'm ok with the phyllo breaking a bit--once you slather it with butter, lay it in and bake it, who cares?
When this happens, the relative timestamps (X minutes ago etc.) are reset to the time at which the post is selected for the front page. The absolute timestamps in the tooltips, like you have discovered, show the actual time in this case.
What a wonderful read! I have particularly fond associations with Baklava relating to my favorite Greek restaurant, Grecian Gyro. Both of my parents would often take me there if we were in the area.
I particularly liked this bit at the end:
[Regarding the dispute over the origins of Baklava]:
>However, Efkan Güllü, the master baklava baker from Gaziantep, prefers to look at it another way.
>“These are places that have historically been interconnected and have been on the same trade routes,” he says. “But also, more fundamentally, it means that we cook in similar ways.” Their shared histories are reflected in their recipes, with each baker adding new, local flair to an ancient classic, like layers upon layers of sweet pastry.
For some things the artisan skill is in approaching machine level efficiency.
(of course in many cases, such as with baklava, hummus and pilsener beer the temptation then arises to cheap out on the ingredients, causing the factory to lose out to the granny, but the principle essentially holds)
I've certainly had bakery baklava that was worse than store-bought. But there are a couple bakeries in Istanbul that make some that blow anything else I've ever tasted (baklava or otherwise) out of the water.
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[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 1161 ms ] threadActually, that sounds incredibly conducive to automation... A quick search, shows people are already selling machines to do it.
Yes, and that's how you ruin things
Most people use almonds to fill it and ready-made pie-sheets (from the supermarket, these are common in Greece because people use them to make pies). It's not difficult to make but, because it needs a lot of almonds it has very expensive, that's why it's not usual to make it on other times.
I don't really like it, I find it boring.
If a multi-layered, crunchy, sweet dessert with filings of various nuts, and dipped in clarified butter, with a little salt to the mix is "boring", I'd love to know of a dessert that you consider 'interesting'.
An interesting desert for me? Not really easy to answer, I guess I'm not into sweets very much ...
Interesting deserts to me manges to balance sweetness against acidity, tartness, bitterness and similar flavours to create more contrast and where the sweetness isn't the dominating taste experience.
0:https://www.farukgulluoglu.com.tr/fistikli-midye-baklava-1-k...
The big problem with baklava is that it turns into a blob of solid glop unless you pay strict attention.
Everything has to be kept very "light". But, when you do, everything is on the verge of falling apart. It will not transport very far or last very long.
Every single one of his reviews on Google and yelp are 5 stars. I deeply admire folks that invest so much of their time into one craft (especially if it happens to be edible) to become the best
Basically, the Unix philosophy applied to cuisine.
But Greek restaurants were the first to arrive in Western cities so that's how the world sees it.
There has been a Greek culture (if not country) practically forever. Saying somehow the Greek people are a new people is just wrong.
That would be like saying China was created in the 1950's. The current government maybe, but not the culture, history, cuisine, etc.
Even conquered peoples generally maintain their culture as the culture or sub-culture of whatever society they live in. The governments might fall, but the people's culture usually lives on.
The Ottoman Empire's own administration did categorize its peoples sorta based on religion and apply different laws to them. The millets were Muslims, Armenians, Greeks, Circassians, and more. These were meaningful designations at least because of how marriage tended to stay within the same religious sect. Besides that, I've heard the closest thing to a national identity back then was the nearest city, rather than the empire. The major cities in that region were ethnically diverse, so some of your culture specifically had to do with your city, while other aspects had to do with your ethnicity/religion.
In this case, baklava supposedly originated in Antep. I don't know what the ethnic makeup was like in the 1500s there, but I'd wager it was picked up by multiple cultures around the same time there (someone can prove me wrong if not). So if you really want to give "credit" to some people for it, I think Antep is the most correct answer, and I don't just mean PC.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_France
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croissant
I typically like to make an all-butter version with walnuts and almonds, and a very tangy citrus-forward honey cinnamon syrup, with the citrus halves simmered in the syrup for many hours. Which, TIL, makes my baklava sort-of-Cypriot. I've also made piles of vegan baklava, replacing butter with shortening, for those vegans that don't accept honey as an animal product. I suppose bees aren't really "kept" so much as "employed".
Easy to make. A bit time consuming perhaps, but worth it. I've had mine "approved" by a colleague with Turkish family and a Greek orthodox grandmother, so it can't be bad!
Edit: it looks like "X minutes ago" feature is broken. Tooltips show the correct time, which is more than 10 hours ago, while it shows 15 minutes ago.
When this happens, the relative timestamps (X minutes ago etc.) are reset to the time at which the post is selected for the front page. The absolute timestamps in the tooltips, like you have discovered, show the actual time in this case.
I particularly liked this bit at the end: [Regarding the dispute over the origins of Baklava]:
>However, Efkan Güllü, the master baklava baker from Gaziantep, prefers to look at it another way.
>“These are places that have historically been interconnected and have been on the same trade routes,” he says. “But also, more fundamentally, it means that we cook in similar ways.” Their shared histories are reflected in their recipes, with each baker adding new, local flair to an ancient classic, like layers upon layers of sweet pastry.
Age or ingredients don't matter much.
Baklava needs to be made just right to work. There's no room for error. And the machines seem to have a upper hand over us on precision.
For some things the artisan skill is in approaching machine level efficiency.
(of course in many cases, such as with baklava, hummus and pilsener beer the temptation then arises to cheap out on the ingredients, causing the factory to lose out to the granny, but the principle essentially holds)
Immigrants touch I guess?
But the median packaged baklava blows the granny’s median baklava out of the water. There’s no contest.
I didn't notice until my partner said after we walked away, "You asked for Balaclava!" haha
Will never live it down...
Gotta be a place