Contrary to popular belief: I am still alive.

I went AWOL recently because I needed a baking break…baking several times a week, plus the WeddSplosion craziness eventually got to me, and I needed a breather to reclaim my creative juices.  And maybe my kitchen (which I again immediately destroyed with this month’s Daring Bakers). >.>

Erica of Erica’s Edibles was our host for the Daring Baker’s June challenge. Erica challenged us to be truly DARING by making homemade phyllo dough and then to use that homemade dough to make Baklava.

But I’m back now and restarting with a Daring Bakers challenge!  I missed the last two months of challenges due to busy schedules, so this one was an absolute must in order to stay in the DB club.  Luckily, this month was all about baklava which is one of my favorite non-chocolate desserts and is something I’ve always been curious about making.

Technically the challenge was on phyllo, the dough used to make baklava.  You can actually buy phyllo at the store in the frozen section if you’re feeling lazy (or just don’t want to go through the hassle of making it), but as usual the Daring Baker challenges exists to weed out the slackers (yet somehow I still remain).

But before I already get into how to cut corners, let’s talk phyllo.

Phyllo is a super-thin unleavened dough used lots of Greek and Middle Eastern recipes.  Its layered flakiness is a bit reminiscent of other flaky pastries like croissants and biscuits, but instead of the flakes coming from dough cut with butter, these layers are actually rolled out individually.  Time consuming, yes, but as with most things once you get the hang of it, it becomes not that bad.

The dough itself is ridiculously simple to make; there’s only a few ingredients and after kneading it gets a nice smooth texture.  Once you let it rest, though, the hard part kicks in.

Long story short, you take a golf ball-sized glob of the dough and flatten the crap out of it.  There were a handful of techniques supplied to us, but when it came right down to it I rolled it out the same way I roll everything else out, just with more gusto.  It’s pretty amazing how thin this dough can get and still stay intact; it becomes literally translucent, it’s so thin.  Naturally you have to handle it carefully in order to not tear it, but even so it’s still pretty sturdy; as long as you’re not yanking on it the sheet of phyllo should be pretty straight-forward to transfer from counter to pan.

The most important thing I found when rolling out and handling the phyllo was flour.  Flour everything.  The counter, the rolling pin, your hands, the dough itself – any time I got frustrated with the dough it was always because I just hadn’t floured a surface enough.  I’m always hesitant to over-flour dough for fear that I’ll make it too dry, but that doesn’t seem to happen with phyllo.  When I eventually stopped worrying and made sure I was dusting the phyllo before flipping it over to re-roll it got much easier to handle.

My Phyllo Rolling Technique:

1. Liberally dust counter, rolling pin, hands, face (optional) with flour.
2. Pull a piece of dough from the main glob and put in on the counter, rolling it into a flat disc with the rolling pin.
3. Flour the top of the dough.  Gently peel it off the counter, dust the counter with flour, flip the dough over.
4. Continue rolling the dough into a flatter sheet.

Then repeat steps 2-4 until the dough is very very thin.  Eventually peeling the dough off of the counter will become more difficult, but the key is to not rush and to make sure you put flour down on everything.  Go team.

Once you make a million (like, 18) sheets of phyllo, the hard part of your baklava is done.  The rest of the process is fun-time layering and adding butter to things.  In the picture above you can see the sugar/cinnamon/nut mixture in my blender, melted butter in my measuring cup, and the phyllo layers cut into the same shape as the pan I’m using.  And various other crap on my tiny tiny counter.

The official recipe given to us called for a 9×9 pan, but for a vast array of reasons including but not limited to me not doubling the phyllo recipe as instructed, I reduced the size to my trusty meatloaf pan (8×3?).  In the pics below you can see the butter/phyllo/sugar-nut mixture layering process.  I ended up with 3 layers of sugar/cinnamon/nut mixture and 4 layers of phyllo (and each phyllo layer consisted of 3 sheets of phyllo).

In addition to grinding up nuts, sugar, and cinnamon in the blender to add between the layers of phyllo, there was also a syrup to make and then pour over the cooked baklava.  The syrup soaks into the baklava overnight and makes it incredibly sweet and delicious, if a little soupy (next time I will probably use less syrup >.>).  The syrup was super-easy to make; it was a mixture of sugar, honey, cinnamon, cloves, and lastly, orange peel!  Actually, with all that junk floating around, it kind of looked like someone threw their compost in my saucepan.

Once poured over the baklava and letting it sit, my end product turned out pretty darn well.  For sure it tasted almost exactly like the baklava I’d had in the past.  Like I mentioned before it did turn out a little soupy, but that’s only because I over-judged how much syrup to add in.  It only meant there was leftover syrup to drip over each piece of baklava.

Final verdict?  Resounding success!  Would I do it again?  Probably…just not very often.  Special occasions only.  Rolling out phyllo is a bit of a pain. 😀

Phyllo & Baklava Recipe

Found here, because I’m way too lazy to type it up!