Baklava is a dessert that came to us from Turkey and is a regular dessert in our home. Otherwise, this calorie bomb is something that cannot be eaten in large quantities, but it has received many praises. That’s why I decided to write down the recipe according to my mother’s dictation and it may come in handy for someone else. Every housewife has her own recipe (how many layers, how much sugar, at what temperature and how long in the oven, what syrup, …)
Table of Contents
Ingridients:
- Jufka – 1 kg – once this dough was made by hand, but today it would be unnecessary work. We buy it in Ljubljana at the indoor market from an Albanian seller and it is a perfectly adequate substitute.
- Walnuts – 1 kg – the walnuts must be finely grounded and a few more coarsely grounded. We buy shelled nuts at the market and grind them ourselves at home on a 50-year-old Moulinex machine. In Turkey, instead of walnuts, they also use pistachios or almonds, I have also heard of recipe with hazelnuts, but it is not popular here.
- Butter – 1.1 kg – it is necessary to melt the butter (1 kg) and remove the foam from the top, thus obtaining ghee or cooked butter, and 100 g is used for filling
- Eggs – 2 pieces
- Flour – 20 dag – white sharp flour
- Sugar – 3 kg – ordinary white sugar
- Lemon – 2 pieces
Procedure:
Filling
- 1x whole egg + 1x yolk (use the remaining white for something else) + 100 g of butter, mix until the mass is even,
- add 200 g of flour and mix again to form crumbs (the mixture is called tirit and helps bind the nuts together and absorbs the butter)
- add 1 kg of ground walnuts and mix together
Stacking
- Melt 1 kg of butter – ghee butter or cooked butter
- grease the baking pan with butter, then place a layer of Jufka and grease it with melted butter. We repeat this 2x
- after 3 times, put a layer of walnuts on jufka and again the jufka and butter and jufka and again there are walnuts, we do this until we still have walnuts and jufka
- at the end, we finish as we started with 3x jufka with butter in between
- when the baklava is cut (diamond shape, about 4 cm wide, at a 45 degree angle, I just got tired of it) spread the remaining butter on the surface and the cuts. cutting is quite a challenge, it must be cut as soon as possible so that jufka does not dry out. if the pan is round, the challenge is greater.
- on top, place another uncut jufka sheet or baking paper to protect it from burning from above, which is thrown away after baking
Baking
- place the pan in the oven where it bakes for a minimum of 3.5 hours. During this time, the temperature is changed between 120, 90 and 50 degrees every 15 minutes, Because it has to be baken evenly to the middle (this recipe has thicker baklava than the others where they bake quickly at 180 degrees). Here you need to have experience, be familiar with the oven, the ingredients, adjust the temperature in between so that the dough does not get burned…
Syrup/Agda
- Add 2 kg of sugar and sliced lemon to 1 liter of water and put on the stove for half an hour.
- 3/4 of the resulting hot liquid is poured over the hot baklava. other recipes have hot baklava and chilled syrup or vice versa
- Add 1 kg of sugar and slices of another lemon to the remaining liquid. Boil again and pour this thick liquid over the baklava. I’ve already heard of recipes with honey or rose syrup, I’ll try it once
Cover the baklava with foil and serve when it cools down. It is even better the next day, when the syrup is fully absorbed. You can also serve it from the refrigerator. To preserve it for longer time you can store it in freezer.
