Where is baklava eaten

Jordan and Lebanon both have simpler versions of baklava. In Jordan, however, it is made with layers of dough with nuts like pistachios and sugar, honey, or syrup. There is a National Baklava Day November 17th is the perfect excuse to make and eat some of your favorite baklava because it is National Baklava Day.

To celebrate, people either go out to their favorite restaurant for some of their favorite dessert, or the more daring people try making their own. Either way, it is always a good excuse to eat more baklava. Find a table. Order Online. Get Directions. What is more than likely is that traditions from a variety of different cultures in the Balkans, Central Asia, and the Middle East combined to create the dessert we call baklava. Although Armenians maintain that they were eating baklava in as early as the tenth century, the earliest reference to baklava dates back a mere five or so hundred years.

But if the fillings have varied over time, the flaky buttered leaves of dough have remained a constant. Turks call this dough yufka which means thin or fragile but in America, we tend to use the Greek word phyllo which means leaf to describe this dough. Today, cooks can buy ready-made phyllo in most American grocery stores but up into the twentieth century, phyllo was typically rolled out by the cook, who used a very long and very thin rolling pin.

The phyllo we buy today is usually sold in rectangles but Greek cooks, Armenian cooks, Serbian cooks, Syrian cooks, Turkish cooks, and others commonly rolled their phyllo into a circular shape.

Skillful cooks could layer dozens of sheets of phyllo to create their pastries, smearing butter and other cooking oils onto the dough to separate the layers.

In nineteenth-century Belgrade, Serbian cooks were reputed to be so skilled that they could roll out and layer hundreds of tissue-thin phyllo sheets in their baklava.

Guild rules, which monitored and regulated who could cook and sell pastry, even required potential candidates to roll out the dough so that it fit within a specifically defined circular pan. Baklava Hits the Road Although traders and travelers from western Europe undoubtedly discovered the delights of baklava when traveling in the Balkans and the Middle East, baklava remained a relatively unknown and, therefore, exotic treat to most westerners up to and into the twentieth century.

But this dough, which began to be eaten in France during the seventeenth century, differed from its Middle Eastern counterpart as butter was kneaded directly into the dough. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, as European colonization of the Middle East escalated, more and more western Europeans and Americans became aware of baklava.

This did not mean, however, that western Europeans or Americans began to eat baklavarather, baklava simply became a catchword for exoticism.

Newspapers, which often promoted swashbuckling adventure stories loved to market stories that highlighted the exotic locales of expanding European and American empires. But because authors themselves often lacked familiarity with these locations, they tended to rely on simple and often hackneyed imagery to establish the setting of their stories.

Traditional baklava is, unfortunately, not vegan. The reason for this is that a primary ingredient used is honey. However, we can easily substitute that and make this taste just like the classic, albeit with no honey flavor.

Furthermore, many people are unaware that phyllo dough and filo pastry is actually vegan. Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search. Press ESC to cancel. Skip to content Home Architecture Where is baklava from originally? Ben Davis February 19, Where is baklava from originally? What countries eat baklava? Is Baklava a Palestinian? Is baklava really unhealthy? How did baklava get popular?

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