How to Make Baklava Part 1/2

Hey, guys! Welcome back to DeDe’s Mediterranean Kitchen. Today, I'm gong to be making one of the most famous deserts in the Mediterranean called Baklava. It’s pronounced also as Bak-lee-wa, so there are a lot of different versions of this. It comes from Turkey, it comes from Greece, it comes from Lebanon, it comes from all over the Mediterranean, a lot of different you know countries do it a little bit differently, I'm going to show you the basic version and how to make it. And if you want to trick it, you want to fill it with something else you can go ahead and do that. Now you can get this recipe and all my other recipes at www.dedemed.com.

Now, the basic for Baklava is phyllo dough and butter that’s the pastry that you are going to need. The filling, if you want to use chocolate, you can use chocolate if you want to use the pecans, macadamia nuts, pine nuts, walnuts, almonds, and pestaccio, anything you want you can fill with. I'm going to be making one version with Cacao’s and one version with walnuts. And now, it also comes in a lot of different shapes and sizes. Some people roll them up into a little fingers, some people cut them to squares and some people them into diamonds. A lot different ways, you can just experiment with it. Now what you are going to start off with is to have about a cup and a half of ground pecans and a cup and a half of ground walnuts. Now you can just you know buy the pecans fresh and just put them in the food processor until they're very fine.

Now, to these I'm going to add the same thing. The seasoning they're pretty much the same, it’s an eight cup of sugar and eight teaspoon of cloves and eight teaspoon of nutmeg, and eight teaspoon of cinnamon. I'm just gong to add these to both of them. Just mix them up really well. Now, I know it’s not a lot of sugar but you're going after the Baklava is done cooking, you are going to pretty much drown it in some Mediterranean simple syrup that has rose water and orange blossom water. It’s a great, great, great addition to the Baklava.

This mix this is one up really quick and then what you are going to need is phyllo dough. Now phyllo dough you can buy at a lot of the grocery stores, a lot of them carry it, it shouldn’t be that hard to find. So all these ingredient are pretty easy to find. The butter that you want to use is sweet cream butter; if you can't find it you can just use regular butter. You want to melt it in a pot in a little pan until it’s melted, a good butter that I like to use is Lurpak, it’s a very good flavor it’s very creamy and it goes really along with the Baklava.

You also wanted to get the simple syrup, that’s one of my recipes on my website. Get that; make it ahead of time before you start the Baklava. Now I have these two mixed, I'm put them on aside. Now I'm going to get the phyllo dough. Phyllo dough you did some is wrap in plastic and what you are going to want to do, you want to work with it pretty fast so that it does not dry out because it will dry out in about 10 to 15 minutes after you open the package. So either you want to work with it fast or put away which you are not going to be using.

Now I'm going to layer the Baklava and put them into squares, mold it into a little pan and I want to cook the Baklava so that it fits in that pan right there. I think I'm going to actually keep it a double layer because I'm going to make into these pans so I'm just going to cut like that. Get the bottom and size like that, and then I’m just marking it there and then it’s really easy to cut. Make sure you do use a serrated knife though just like that and then I'm going to cut this in half. Now when I do the bottom layer, I want to use 10 phyllos for the butter and then the layers in between—you can add at many layers as you want to the Baklava regards to the nuts. You can alternate it between phyllo, nut, phyllo, nut, phyllo, nut as many as you want. I am going to do two layers, so I'm going to put this on the side, preferably put it in a plastic right away so that it doesn’t dry out.

Here we go I have the phyllo dough right, here is my pan actually want to put this on the side so you guys can see better and here is my butter. You want to butter each layer. This we need a brush, a pastry brush; you want to put a little bit of butter on it and then just go down like you’re painting. Just simply brush it, you don’t want gloves of butter all over it but you want to simply brush it. You also want to brush your pan before you put the phyllo dough in it and just like that, just brush the pan around. You want to preheat your oven to 350 degrees and after we layer the baklava, we’re going to cook it for 30 to 45 minutes depending on your oven, until the Baklava is—[audio cut]