Baking Baklava

Baklava.... It began while eating pizza at a restaurant that used to be My Big Fat Greek Restaurant. "We went there for my birthday once." I said, "And we got baklava!"

"I saw a recipe for Baklava!" Stacey said, "I've been meaning to try it!"

And Cameron piped up, "Alton Brown [his cooking idol] has a recipe for Baklava!"

Thus our competition was born: The Great Baklava-ke-off (pronounced bah-klah-vah-klauff, a mish mash of Baklava and Bake-off) in which two teams go head to head to see whose baklava recipe is better!!! 

The girls' team: Stacey, Katie, and yours truly. Stacey's recipe was great because it came out of a Guidepost magazine and along with it there was the most adorable story about a Turkish woman who was somewhat conned into making this dish, which she'd never had before!! But all turned out well in the end (of course) and this (on the facing page) was the recipe she used.

Not unlike croissant dough, the thing about making Baklava is that it's not difficult per se. The hardest part of the whole process was probably keeping our sheets of dough from fusing together and/or drying out too quickly. But it is a very time-consuming dessert to make. Why? Because to get all that flaky goodness, you must alternate layers of dough with thin layers of butter. Butter and dough. Butter and dough. 20 or 30 times butter and dough! (I think we had about 25 sheets on the bottom layer with a nut layer in between and a top layer with another 25 sheets, all saturated in buttery goodness).

Fun fact: we ended up using twice as much butter as we were supposed to for a total of 4 sticks! (Our butter layers were probably not thin enough due to our paste-y brush.)

Meanwhile, back on the ranch, Cameron claimed Mom for his partner and proceeded to make Alton Brown's (more complicated) traditional recipe. This picture is in the par-baking stage. It was interesting to see how the recipes differed because they were very different. Our recipe was simpler with fewer ingredients and fewer steps. Cam's recipe was more complex with multiple kinds of nuts and a special way of melting the butter, several nut layers instead of one, and the incorporation of rose water (???). He gave me a whiff of the bottle and said, "Smells like old ladies."

The official tasting is scheduled for Saturday night. Stay tuned for the results!

Tada! Beautiful Baklava!