Almond Baklavadakia

Inspired by VC's puff pastry posts, I decided to revisit an old friend of mine: phyllo dough. Baklavadakia are like baklava, except in a roll form instead of the flaky parallelograms more commonly seen.

I was moderately infatuated with baklava during the summer after my freshman year of college. It took me a while to figure out that you needed rose water to make it taste right, which I made at home yesterday with a bunch of dried rosebuds from the Chinese grocer (basically, you make tea out of the dried flowers, & keep the water in the fridge). This recipe simplifies the parallelogram-shaped baklava, which takes about 3 hours to make per tray -- into rollups that are faster to make. The tray you see above took me about 20 minutes to prep, and 10 minutes to bake. Granted, I am used to working with the dough, so it may take longer on a first try. But this was way faster, and required less skill, than assembling a conventional pan. I also used almonds instead of walnuts, because 1) almonds are cheaper and 2) I am not crazy about walnuts, though they make the pastry taste more baklava-ey. OH WELL. To hell with conventional, per usual.

The results were light, crunchy, and drier than I might have preferred. Given my aversion to sugar and butter, I might have made the syrup the day before, waited for it to thicken and cool, then pour it on my hot pastry.

(makes about 24 bite sized pieces; or a plateful)

Recipe modified from this post.

Ingredients:

phyllo pastry dough (needs to sit in the fridge overnight to thaw out)
2/3 c almond slices
4 tsp white sugar
4 or 5 dashes of cinnamon
1 dash nutmeg
2 ground whole cloves (or maybe just a sprinkle if you have the powder form)
2 T melted butter

for syrup:
1/3 c rose tea, cooled
less than 1/3 c sugar
2 T honey
juice of 1 lemon wedge

Directions:

1. Toss almonds, sugar, and spices together in a bowl. Grease your baking sheet with olive oil or melted butter.

2. Keeping the unused phyllo covered with a damp paper towel, lay one sheet of phyllo on your worksurface and brush lightly with butter. I used a square of paper towel as my brush, since I don't have a pastry brush. Layer another sheet of phyllo over that, and brush with butter again. This is your basic layer (2 layers). Orient the sheet so that the long edge is facing you.

3. Sprinkle this layer with your nut mixture, leaving 1/2 inch on all sides and a full 1 inch on the layer closest to you. Take the close (long) edge and begin to roll it up, brushing the underside with butter as you go. Put the roll, edge facing down, on a greased baking sheet.

4. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

5. Make three more rolls accordingly.

6. Baked for 10 minutes. Check to see that the tops are golden brown. If you want them darker, wait another minute. If I had to do this again, I would have baked for 8 minutes and taken them out at 9. These are fast. Unlike the pan version, which takes forever to cook through, on top of being extremely finicky with respect to baking times.

7. While they're baking, boil the syrup ingredients. Let it boil for a minute before taking it off heat. You can do this the day before and let it cool in your fridge. The rule is, if you have hot pastry, pour COLD syrup over it. If you have cooled pastry, pour HOT syrup over it. But if you try to pour hot syrup over hot pastry, the liquid will absorb through the phyllo skins and you will end up with one soggy, undifferentiated mass.

8. Sprinkle with whatever remaining nut mixture you may have. Cut them in half, then into thirds, with a sharp knife. Trim the ends. Here is a cross-sectional view:


And a bird's eye: