Turkish Rolls Baklava: Culinary Tour lands in Turkey!

Clicca qui per la versione italiana

 Joan’s Culinary Tour (Foodalogue) this week takes us to Turkey. Turkey’s charm has many faces.

Landscapes: from the great mountains of Ararat

to the giant lake Van.

Not to mention the ‘soda’ lakes as the ‘Solda Golu” and the thermal springs of Pamukkale (“cotton castle”), where the water limestone is deposited in thick layers along the mountain slopes, giving rise to a natural spectacle of an incredible visual impact. Here in the picture you can see the ‘artistic’ result of  colourful algae …

Photo from Swisseduc.ch

Anyway, talking about Turkey makes me immediately think of Istanbul. I’ve been in Turkey once but not in Istanbul, and I’d like to visit this place. Just last Saturday I happened to listen a beautiful Turkey’ s portrait on the radio, by Marta Ottaviani, a journalist and writer living in Istanbul since 2005, both for work and by choice. If you want to hear her story click here (only Italian version).

Talking about Turkey’s scent and flavours, this week I decided to try the Baklava Rolls.

Recipe is from Hulya of Turkish Cuisine, a very interesting blog about traditional Turkish Style Cooking. I only replaced the lemmon juice with the orange blossom water. Just an addition suggested by Francesco of Chefchezvous, who recently cooked a delicious Baklava!

The result is a truly new flavour for me.

For Baklava Rolls you need:

1 package phyllo dough – 2 Cups chopped natural pistachios – 2 Cups sugar – 1 stick melted butter – 1 cup water – 2 tbsp orange flower water

Start preparing the syrup, putting water and sugar in a pan. Boil and let it simmer for 10 minutes. Turn the heat off, add the orange blossom water and let it cool.

 Meanwhile, take 6 sheets of phyllo dough, brush every sheet with melted butter and overlap them one by one: you’ll have a 6 sheets’ rectangle.

Put 2 tbsp of chopped pistachios along the rectangle’s long edge and start wrinkling the dough with your hands. Continue adding chopped pistachios while wrinkling. When you finish with all sheets, you can cut the ‘big rolls’ into smaller pieces like finger long.

Brush their top with melted butter as well and place them all in a pan. Bake it into 350 F pre-heated oven until golden brown.

After you remove from oven, let them cool to room temperature before pouring syrup over them slowly.

A little experiment: I do not like much butter, so I used olive oil for my rolls’ ‘second round’. They were excellent in my opinion (very modest!). You just have to leave the rolls stay in the syrup for a while once they are cooked and let them soak (just to eliminate the olive oil taste). This different process makes them tasty and fluffy!

 Hope my dish looks ‘Turkish just a little bit…afiyet olsun!!!