Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Adventures in baklava making

Recipe: http://www.food.com/recipe/baklava-59863

Changes:
-regular honey
-no lemon/orange peels

Thoughts:
-Buying a better quality honey and trying the peels would be nice.  
-I used smoked almonds, which I think messed with what baklava should taste like.  (I'd use all walnuts, or a walnut/pistachio mix in the future.)  
-The phyllo dough was extremely hard to work with because it is almost as thin as tissue paper.  It already had tears in it when I opened the package.   In addition, it dries out very quickly.  
-I ran out of butter on a snowy day and used canola oil between the last 5 layers.  This was detrimental, as you can imagine. 
-My baklava appears thin compared to most I've seen.  Maybe it needs more layers?  I did halve the recipe.
-This took only 50 minutes at ~315 degrees in my ornery electric oven.  
-In my experience, this tasted fine about 10 minutes after I poured the syrup on and it all sank to the bottom.  Three hours of sitting, as well as overnight, hasn't seemed to make much of a difference in flavor.

So obviously there is room for improvement.  But I am looking forward to giving this another try.






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