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.
The sticky history of baklava
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Re: The sticky history of baklava
#12The 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".
Re: The sticky history of baklava
#13Whether 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.
Syria isnt 300 years old ? Damascus is one of the oldest cities in the world.....
Re: The sticky history of baklava
#14I 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.
Re: The sticky history of baklava
#15What 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.
Re: The sticky history of baklava
#16Whether 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.
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.
Re: The sticky history of baklava
#17I 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.
Re: The sticky history of baklava
#18Hot 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.
Re: The sticky history of baklava
#19Hot 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 agree, same with hummus.
Re: The sticky history of baklava
#20Whether 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.
Syria isnt 300 years old ? Damascus is one of the oldest cities in the world.....
The Syrian Arab Republic was established in 1961, and its current form of government was only adopted in 2012. Damascus is old; Syria is not.