Anyone who was in Turkey certainly tasted local sweets, such as baklava. This dish has an unforgettable honey taste, as it contains sorbet, almonds and pistachios. An interesting fact is that honey is rarely added to sweets, usually they use water, lemon juice and sugar instead. At the same time, every professional oriental culinary specialist knows how to cook baklava. In the East, this delicacy is considered to be one of the best, it is prepared for every holiday.
Baklava can be of many different types, depending on the methods of slicing the dough and the ingredients used. However, the dough in all cases should be very thin, while it is folded into several layers, between which various nuts and sorbets are placed. The finished treat is placed on a huge tray and cut into small pieces.
Before preparing baklava, the culinary specialists take a two-meter strong rolling pin and roll out the dough very thinly, then they wind it onto the rolling pin, as if juggling, and repeat the procedure again. Thus, a rather thin layer of dough is obtained. Translated from Turkish, the word "baklava" means "Look, sweet!".
Today, the preparation of baklava is a long process, while the recipes for its preparation vary depending on the location of the eastern region. This alone remains unchanged: the dessert should be prepared from puff pastry soaked in sorbet, with the addition of nuts.
Let's consider in detail how to cook baklava at home.
To prepare a Turkish treat, you will need two glasses of flour, fifty grams of ghee, five tablespoons of milk, one egg, two hundred grams of any nuts, half a glass of sugar, soda and salt, saffron, sugar, citric acid.
First you need to knead a cool dough: the egg is ground with sugar, salt and soda, flour and hot milk are added to it. The dough should be postponed for one hour, after which it is rolled into a thin layer and divided into parts. One part of the dough is placed on a baking sheet, sprinkled with chopped nuts and sugar, covered with the next layer of dough, greased with oil, continue until it is over. A cake so constructed is cut with diamonds, smeared with yolk mixed with saffron and placed in the oven for forty minutes. Ten minutes before cooking, baklava is watered with syrup made from sugar, citric acid and water, and sprinkled with powdered sugar.
In our country, not many people know how to cook baklava. It should be said that baklava is a pie stuffed with nuts. Moreover, it can be of several types, both rich and yeast, depending on the chosen test. The finished treat can be stored for a very long time in a cold place.
For example, consider how to cook baklava from yeast dough.
To prepare the dough you will need a pound of flour, a glass of milk, half a teaspoon of dried yeast, one spoon of sugar.
It is necessary to warm the milk a little, add sugar and yeast into it, mix everything and leave for a while. After raising the yeast, flour is poured and the dough is kneaded, which is placed for several hours in a warm place to increase in volume. Next, the baklava is prepared in the same way as in the previous recipe.
Thus, although there are quite a lot of methods for making baklava, nuts, dough and syrup invariably remain in its composition. In Eastern countries, experienced chefs can easily create unique “masterpieces” with outstanding taste qualities that are in demand all over the world. And interestingly, this delicacy arose in the XIV century and has retained its popularity to this day.