Monday 5 May 2008

A bit of Middle Eastern promise


To compensate for my postponed travel plans, here's a recipe:

Baclawa
(makes about 20)

250g filo pastry
80g butter, melted

For the syrup
125 g sugar
75 ml water
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon liquid honey
1 tablespoon rose water

For the filling
180g walnuts, coarsely ground
80 g sugar
1 tablespoon cinnamon
grated zest of 1 lemon

To make the syrup:
boil water and sugar for 10 mins, add honey and rose water and boil for another minute

Mix the filling ingredients.

I used a round 20cm tin, but probably some square baking tin or dish would work better. Grease tin and fit half the pastry sheets in the tray, one a time, brushed generously with the butter, fold/overlap - or simply: crumpled - the sheets around the edges. Spread the nut mixture evenly over sheets; layer the remaining sheets as before; also brush the top layer with melted butter. Cut parallel lines through all the layers with a sharp pointed knive. Bakes in preheated 160C oven for an hour.

Take baclawa out and let cool for five minutes; pour syrup over the cut lines and the whole tin; put back into oven for another five minutes [this is the cheating bit as per recipe]; you can reduce the amount of syrup for a less sweeter version.

This is a jumbled together version of different recipes from Claudia Roden's The Book of Jewish Food which I love for the Sephardic recipes.

Enjoy! I pictured myself on West Jerusalem's shuq, and it worked.
Look for yourself:


7 comments:

Lindsay said...

IT would work better with one of those mouth watering sweets to go with the movie! THanks for posting this.

Casey Klahn said...

Now I've "been to market!"

Gesa said...

Yes, Lindsay - that's for the repeat then... they are actually much more straightforward to make than I thought.
It's a good market to have been to, Casey, isn't it? My local market here is just full of meat: up-market meat at that, but I do miss a market with lots of fruit and veg; and that one is pretty good for that. Did you notice the masses of strawberries, the the pomegranate juice maker?

Bensa said...

Shalom meine Süße! Na, so viel Jerusalem hier bei Dir - schön! Wußte gar nicht, daß Du den Shuk gefilmt hast. Bin gespannt auf Baklava-Berichte am Fon. Sehr fein! Auf bald! Neshikot mi Yerushalaim! I.

Gesa said...

und ebenso nen kuss von hier zu dir! red ich ami, und hab ich ne kamera? nee... also nicht meins, trotzdem aber ganz wunderbar. waere gerne dort und freu mich auf wenn's soweit ist :)

littlemithi said...

Nom Nom Nom ....

My dad would have loved this - He studied in Turkey for his masters back in the 70s and still gets excited by baklava :)

Gesa said...

Nice one, Mithi... my associations with baklava are also ones which will keep me excited for a long time, though they don't quite go back to the 1970s - that was firmly German bakery at that point. Funny how some things just stay, isn't it?!