Fitz and Marie's Recipes
  

   Desserts   
Paklava
   Rachel Paperniak Serves ?
 
Ingredients:
  • 1 pkg of Filo dough
  • 3 sticks butter - melted (only use the real stuff - majorine doesn't cook
  • as well in this)
  • 10 oz. Walnuts - chopped
  • 1 1/2 cups sugar
  • 1 cup water
  • 1/2 teaspoon lemon juice

Use a 13x9x2 glass pan - you can use metal but the glass cooks much much better pastry/cooking brush

Keep the Filo dough frozen until the day before or at least 12 hrs before you are ready to use it. Thaw the dough in the package in the frig for at least 12 hours.

Brush bottom and sides of pan with melted butter. Fold 1 sheet in half (like a book) so it fits in pan. Brush dough with butter so that all is covered in butter. Be generous but there shouldn't be butter standing in the pan. Continue doing this with 5-6 more sheets of Filo. Don't forget the butter in between! If some sheets stick together, put half of sheets in pan an butter before folding over the other half of sheets. After the butter is placed on the stack of filo sheets, sprinkle with 1/3 of chopped nuts. Do NOT put butter on top of nuts! Continue with the filo layers, butter and nuts.

Basically you are making 4 layers of filo with 3 layers of nuts in between the filo. So if you have 20 sheets of filo in your package you will have something like this from bottom to top:

5 layers filo & butter

1/3 nuts

5 layers filo & butter

1/3 nuts

5 layers filo & butter

1/3 nuts

5 layers filo & butter

Once you are finished, place pan in the freezer long enough to harden. Once the Paklava is hardened, then you can cut it with a sharp knife. Make sure you do a good job cutting - it is much easier here than after it is cooked! I cut it one way diagonally in the pan and the other way straight across - this makes the pieces into diamonds.

Bake at 350 for 30 minutes or until golden brown.

Cook sugar and water together for 10 minutes until a clear syrup is formed. Then add the lemon juice to the syrup.

Poor lukewarm syrup over lukewarm Paklava in the pan. Don't forget to pour some around the edges! Let it sit out so that syrup is absorbed into the pastry. This takes at least 1-2 hours. If you look at the bottom of the pan there shouldn't be alot of syrup just sitting there.

I like to serve them in cupcake paper cups. Enjoy!


 
chop
Last modified 06 August, 2004
© 2002 B. W. Fitzpatrick
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