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There’s a baklava place in SF called Baklava Story that is hands down the best baklava I have ever had and probably will ever will have. The owner, Tolgay, travels to Turkey each year to source pistachios and milk to make butter with from specific farms each year. With the residual milk from making clarified butter from the Turkish milk, he makes soap, and gives it to customers.
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
This is one of my retirement dreams. Not baklava, but take a food item that I cherish (I won't divulge which one!), and execute on it as well as I can possibly imagine, vertically integrating as much of the inputs as possible. I love his minimal waste approach with the auxiliary soap output.
Basically, the Unix philosophy applied to cuisine.
Please make the menu a manpage
Moved to Vegas a few years ago and hadn’t met the neighbors ahead of time. Turns out they’re Turkish and their cousin brings us a full pan of homemade baklava once a quarter. Mixes the types up. Perfect neighbors! Also, Summerlin farmers market has a baklava seller that even makes Hawaiian Baklava with reduced pineapple syrup.
Don't say than, until you've had Lebannese baklava. Both the Turkish and Greek varieties are oversweet. Lebanese baklava on the other hand is finer, more refined and does not drip syrop.
by the dandelion factory right? I biked passed it yesterday and saw that they just reopened.
> "Baklava is made by thinning the dough to a fine micro-degree, and by putting 10 or 11 layers on top of each other by hand," says Güllü. It is not a process conducive to automation.
Actually, that sounds incredibly conducive to automation... A quick search, shows people are already selling machines to do it.
I think most baklava comes from factories, and whichever ones don't taste so good, it's probably just because they didn't use the best/freshest ingredients.
> Actually, that sounds incredibly conducive to automation
Yes, and that's how you ruin things
Here in Greece (actually central Greece) houses traditionally make Baklava for the Christmas - new years eve period. It is considered a "holiday" treat.
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.
True baklava is not boring. The one you describe is boring because it has no finesse. I’ve had it in Greece, and I make it at home, it’s just a sugar fix. True baklava is an experience. Most baklava in Turkey is bad too. The one mentioned in the article is pretty good but the bests are the other ones in Gaziantep. Something about the combination of worlds best pistachios and grass fed clarified butter. It is sublime. Michelin star level shit. Worth flying to Gaziantep for. Too bad it’s the butt of the world. I order from here [0] when I’m in Turkey. I think it’s the brother or cousin of the guy mentioned in the article. They fly it out the day it’s made. I think they send to some European cities too. It loses its amazing smell after a couple days, though so tough luck for other parts of the world.
0:https://www.farukgulluoglu.com.tr/fistikli-midye-baklava-1-k...
> ...I find it boring
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'.
Hmmm probably I had eaten that too many times as a kid so now as an adult I dislike it? Or maybe it's the way that people here make it? It all depends on the execution!
An interesting desert for me? Not really easy to answer, I guess I'm not into sweets very much ...
My problem with most baklava to me is that all the subtlety and refinement you are talking about just gets lost is big old mess of "sweet". My general baklava experience is that the first bite is good, the second bite is enough and after the third bite I kind of wish I hadn't. It's like some people and chilli heat, once you pass a certain level, it doesn't matter how refined and complex the underlying dish is, all they can taste is 'hot'.
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.
Every time I have tried baklava it was so overpoweringly sweet that I could not manage to finish even a tiny piece. The sugar/honey overwhelmed everything else. So count me as one that agrees with baklava being "boring".
Here in Serbia, baklava is mostly too sweet for my taste. I prefer another Turkish dessert called tufahija, which is cooked apple with central part with seeds taken out and filled with grinded walnuts and honey, soaked in sugary water and topped with whipped cream.
Too much honey, most likely.
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.
Same situation for albanians but we use walnuts instead of almonds.
Same for us Bulgarians, at least in my region
The Balkans has a strong baklava tradition after centuries of Turkish occupation, but today virtually any confectionary shop, even the poshest, is going to use palm oil. You aren't getting the original recipe with butter or olive oil unless you do the whole painstaking process at home. I wonder if the same has become true in Turkey as well.
Baklava isn't really all that hard to make in your home kitchen if you use premade phyllo, available in almost every supermarket (in the US, anyway, although I also saw it in London and Germany). Then you can alter the fats and volatiles as much as you please. The hardest part, in this instance, is finding the precisely correct thawing time for the frozen phyllo. Too little, it is brittle and breaks instantly; too much, and it is sodden.
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".
Yes, homemade is the best. My mom makes it with honey and pecans making them sort-of-Texan. I'm ok with the phyllo breaking a bit--once you slather it with butter, lay it in and bake it, who cares?
I make my own, the pastry is available easily in the UK (sometimes not in stock everywhere, it isn't as common as other types of pastry). I buy refrigerated rather than frozen and have not had an issue with getting the warming-to-work-with timing OK.
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!
Not the good ones from Antep. They use clarified butter.
I love baklava, especially with pistachios and rosewater. They used to make some good stuff in a great kebab shop in North Kensington, London, called Fez Mangal. It's the kind of place that has photos of famous customers all over the wall, but kept prices at an affordable level.
I still remember going up to a guy at a market who was selling Baklava and asking him for 'Two pieces of Balaclava please".
I didn't notice until my partner said after we walked away, "You asked for Balaclava!" haha
Will never live it down...
Hot take: Packaged baklava blows bakery (fresh) baklava out of the water.
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.
I've certainly had bakery baklava that was worse than store-bought. But there are a couple bakeries in Istanbul that make some that blow anything else I've ever tasted (baklava or otherwise) out of the water.
Heading to Istanbul in a few weeks. Do you have any recs for good places?
New Jersey baklava is much better than Istanbul baklava actually. Try it.
Immigrants touch I guess?
Hard disagree but I guess we have access to completely different packaged baklava and grannies that make this yummy stuff.
I’ve had both. The granny’s peak baklava may be better, I’ll concede.
But the median packaged baklava blows the granny’s median baklava out of the water. There’s no contest.
Not in the US. I can't even bring myself to call the packaged stuff baklava. Baklava-esque?
I agree, same with hummus.
And pilsener beer.
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)
What a wonderful read! I have particularly fond associations with Baklava relating to my favorite Greek restaurant, Grecian Gyro. Both of my parents would often take me there if we were in the area.
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.
If you like baklava and Greek/Mediterranean cuisine, especially if you like to cook it, you'll love Dmitra's Dishes: https://youtube.com/@DimitrasDishes?si=ivasQL7zG_Al1PPZ
I swear I've seen this post and exact same comments earlier today.
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.
This post has been rescued by the second chance pool at https://news.ycombinator.com/pool
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.
Interesting, didn't know about that.
Whether baklava is Greek or Turkish or Syrian is a silly question because none of those countries are even 300 years old.
But Greek restaurants were the first to arrive in Western cities so that's how the world sees it.
Some countries are named for particular cultures which have existed for longer than a particular government using the name. For example, the current governing body of "France" was established 4 October 1958 [0]. But if you go to a French bakery you might buy a fresh croissant which dates to maybe 1839 [1]. Is that not still French even though the current republic is over a hundred years younger?
Syria isnt 300 years old ? Damascus is one of the oldest cities in the world.....
I think the parent poster meant that the specific modern countries are fairly new, and before they were all part of the same entities. Greece and Turkey were both part of the Byzantine Empire for centuries, and later part of the successor Ottoman Empire - together with Syria - again for centuries. Separate "national" identities for those areas didn't really exist until the XIX century, when Greeks started agitating for independence from Ottoman rule.
If you like baklava, try also kadaif (aka Tel Kadayif), it's even better...
Any recommendations for a good baklava in New York City / Brooklyn?
Gotta be a place
Check out cheese borek, baklava’s savory cousin!
My usual order at a turkish kebab shop starts with borek, and ends with baklava. Can't go without.