The sticky history of baklava
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
Every single one of his reviews on Google and yelp are 5 stars. I deeply admire folks that invest so much of their time into one craft (especially if it happens to be edible) to become the best
Basically, the Unix philosophy applied to cuisine.
Actually, that sounds incredibly conducive to automation... A quick search, shows people are already selling machines to do it.
Yes, and that's how you ruin things
Most people use almonds to fill it and ready-made pie-sheets (from the supermarket, these are common in Greece because people use them to make pies). It's not difficult to make but, because it needs a lot of almonds it has very expensive, that's why it's not usual to make it on other times.
I don't really like it, I find it boring.
0:https://www.farukgulluoglu.com.tr/fistikli-midye-baklava-1-k...
If a multi-layered, crunchy, sweet dessert with filings of various nuts, and dipped in clarified butter, with a little salt to the mix is "boring", I'd love to know of a dessert that you consider 'interesting'.
An interesting desert for me? Not really easy to answer, I guess I'm not into sweets very much ...
Interesting deserts to me manges to balance sweetness against acidity, tartness, bitterness and similar flavours to create more contrast and where the sweetness isn't the dominating taste experience.
The big problem with baklava is that it turns into a blob of solid glop unless you pay strict attention.
Everything has to be kept very "light". But, when you do, everything is on the verge of falling apart. It will not transport very far or last very long.
I typically like to make an all-butter version with walnuts and almonds, and a very tangy citrus-forward honey cinnamon syrup, with the citrus halves simmered in the syrup for many hours. Which, TIL, makes my baklava sort-of-Cypriot. I've also made piles of vegan baklava, replacing butter with shortening, for those vegans that don't accept honey as an animal product. I suppose bees aren't really "kept" so much as "employed".
Easy to make. A bit time consuming perhaps, but worth it. I've had mine "approved" by a colleague with Turkish family and a Greek orthodox grandmother, so it can't be bad!
I didn't notice until my partner said after we walked away, "You asked for Balaclava!" haha
Will never live it down...
Age or ingredients don't matter much.
Baklava needs to be made just right to work. There's no room for error. And the machines seem to have a upper hand over us on precision.
Immigrants touch I guess?
But the median packaged baklava blows the granny’s median baklava out of the water. There’s no contest.
For some things the artisan skill is in approaching machine level efficiency.
(of course in many cases, such as with baklava, hummus and pilsener beer the temptation then arises to cheap out on the ingredients, causing the factory to lose out to the granny, but the principle essentially holds)
I particularly liked this bit at the end: [Regarding the dispute over the origins of Baklava]:
>However, Efkan Güllü, the master baklava baker from Gaziantep, prefers to look at it another way.
>“These are places that have historically been interconnected and have been on the same trade routes,” he says. “But also, more fundamentally, it means that we cook in similar ways.” Their shared histories are reflected in their recipes, with each baker adding new, local flair to an ancient classic, like layers upon layers of sweet pastry.
Edit: it looks like "X minutes ago" feature is broken. Tooltips show the correct time, which is more than 10 hours ago, while it shows 15 minutes ago.
When this happens, the relative timestamps (X minutes ago etc.) are reset to the time at which the post is selected for the front page. The absolute timestamps in the tooltips, like you have discovered, show the actual time in this case.
But Greek restaurants were the first to arrive in Western cities so that's how the world sees it.
The Ottoman Empire's own administration did categorize its peoples sorta based on religion and apply different laws to them. The millets were Muslims, Armenians, Greeks, Circassians, and more. These were meaningful designations at least because of how marriage tended to stay within the same religious sect. Besides that, I've heard the closest thing to a national identity back then was the nearest city, rather than the empire. The major cities in that region were ethnically diverse, so some of your culture specifically had to do with your city, while other aspects had to do with your ethnicity/religion.
In this case, baklava supposedly originated in Antep. I don't know what the ethnic makeup was like in the 1500s there, but I'd wager it was picked up by multiple cultures around the same time there (someone can prove me wrong if not). So if you really want to give "credit" to some people for it, I think Antep is the most correct answer, and I don't just mean PC.
There has been a Greek culture (if not country) practically forever. Saying somehow the Greek people are a new people is just wrong.
That would be like saying China was created in the 1950's. The current government maybe, but not the culture, history, cuisine, etc.
Even conquered peoples generally maintain their culture as the culture or sub-culture of whatever society they live in. The governments might fall, but the people's culture usually lives on.
Gotta be a place