Baklava

What baklava is

Baklava is a pastry of many layers of paper-thin dough, brushed with clarified butter, filled with chopped nuts and baked until gold, then soaked in sugar syrup. A good piece has a shatter to it. The layers stay separate, the nut filling is bright and the syrup has gone into the dough rather than pooled underneath it.

In Turkey the reference version is fıstıklı baklava, made with green pistachio from Gaziantep. Walnut baklava is the norm in the north and across inner Anatolia, and it is cheaper. Everything else, from şöbiyet to sarı burma, is a variation on the same three ingredients: dough, butter and nut.

From the palace kitchens to the street

Layered dough pastries have a long history across Central Asia, Persia and the Byzantine world, and the argument over who invented baklava will not be settled here. What is documented is that the dish took its modern form in the kitchens of Topkapı Palace in Istanbul during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Palace cooks competed to roll the dough thinner and stack it higher.

The clearest record is the Baklava Alayı, the Baklava Procession. On the fifteenth day of Ramadan, from the seventeenth century onward, the sultan sent trays of baklava to the Janissary barracks.

Each unit carried its tray back through the streets in a formal parade, and a refused tray was read as a sign of unrest. The pastry was already a political object, as the Ottoman chapter of Anatolian history makes clear.

Baklava left the palace as bakers trained there opened shops in the city. By the nineteenth century, sweet shops in Istanbul sold it by weight, and the trade spread to every provincial capital. The Gaziantep bakers, who had the best pistachios on their doorstep, took the lead in the twentieth century.

Gaziantep and its pistachio

Gaziantep, usually called Antep, sits in the Southeast near the Syrian border and is the food capital of the country, the place where Turkish cuisine is loudest about itself. The city has a documented baklava trade going back to the 1870s and today has hundreds of shops. In 2013 the European Union registered Antep Baklavası as a protected geographical indication, the first Turkish product to receive it.

The reason is the nut. Antep fıstığı, the Gaziantep pistachio, is smaller than the Iranian or Californian variety, with a darker green kernel and more oil. It is harvested in August and September before the shell splits, which keeps the color.

Baklava made in early autumn with the new crop is the version locals wait for. The green is almost luminous, and the difference from a tray made in spring with last year's nuts is visible from across the shop.

Bakers in Gaziantep also insist on clarified sheep's-milk butter from the surrounding plateau and on flour milled from local hard wheat. Whether every claim is measurable or not, Antep baklava tastes different: more nut, less sugar, a cleaner butter finish.

How it is made

The dough, yufka, is flour, water, egg and a little salt, rested and then rolled. A skilled usta rolls a fist of dough into a sheet more than a meter across using an oklava, a thin wooden rod, dusting with starch so the layers do not stick.

The sheet is thin enough to read a newspaper through it. Forty sheets is the standard for a tray, and some shops go higher.

Half the sheets go into the tray, each brushed with butter. The nut layer follows, then the remaining sheets. The tray is cut into squares, diamonds or fingers before baking so the butter reaches every layer.

It bakes for around 40 minutes until the top is an even gold. The syrup, sugar, water and a squeeze of lemon, is boiled separately and poured hot over the hot pastry, and the sound it makes is part of the craft.

The order matters. Hot syrup on hot baklava keeps the layers crisp. Cold syrup or cold pastry gives you a soggy tray, which is the most common failure in restaurants and most home kitchens.

The main varieties

Fıstıklı baklava, the pistachio classic, is the benchmark and the most expensive. Cevizli, with walnut, is the everyday version and better than its reputation when the walnuts are fresh. Kuru baklava, dry baklava, is made without kaymak, the clotted cream layer some shops add, and is the version that travels.

Şöbiyet is a triangle folded around pistachio and thick cream, richer and softer. Sarı burma, "yellow twist," is dough rolled around nuts on the oklava, crinkled and cut into cylinders. Havuç dilimi, "carrot slice," is baklava cut in wedges from a round tray.

Midye, "mussel," is a shell-shaped fold. Bülbül yuvası, "nightingale's nest," is a ring of shredded dough with a pistachio center.

Each shop lists a dozen or more, but they are all the same dough and butter in different shapes. Taste the plain fıstıklı first; if that is good, everything else in the shop will be.

How to tell good baklava

Look at the cut edge. The layers should be visible and distinct, not fused into a paste. The color should be gold, not dark brown, and the nut layer should be green for pistachio and pale for walnut, never grey.

Pick up a piece: it should hold its shape and leave almost no syrup on the plate. Smell it, too. Real butter has a clean, slightly nutty scent, while margarine and vegetable shortening smell of nothing or faintly of oil.

Then bite. The top should crackle, the middle should be tender and the sweetness should stop well short of cloying. If it is sticky, wet or tastes mainly of sugar, it was made carelessly or a long time ago.

Where to eat it, and who makes it

In Istanbul the historic names are Karaköy Güllüoğlu, opened in Karaköy in 1949 by a family with Gaziantep roots going back to the 1870s, and Hafız Mustafa, a confectioner founded in 1864 whose branches now line Sultanahmet, a few steps from Hagia Sophia, and Eminönü. Both are open late and serve at the counter. In Gaziantep the reference is İmam Çağdaş, trading since 1887 in the old bazaar, which also makes the city's other export, lahmacun.

Outside those cities, buy from a baklavacı, a shop that makes only sweets, not from a bakery or supermarket. Serve baklava at room temperature with Turkish coffee or tea; the bitterness balances the syrup. It belongs to the sweet end of the cuisine guide, alongside Turkish delight, and like lokum it is the gift most often carried to someone's house.

Carrying it home

Ask for kuru baklava for the suitcase; it keeps for two weeks or more in its metal tin. Syrup baklava should be eaten within four days and kept in the box at room temperature, never in the refrigerator.

A kilo box is the usual gift size. Gaziantep's bakers ship overnight within Turkey, and the shops at Istanbul's airports stock the main brands, though the price is higher than in the city. If your route runs through Cappadocia, Ephesus or the Lycian coast, buy on the last day rather than the first.

Questions