La Zette

Trileçe reached Turkey through the Balkans and takes its name directly from its recipe. A baked cake is soaked in a mixture of milk, cream and condensed milk; because three different dairy products a…

The name of this cake describes the production step directly. Cocoa syrup is poured over the cake as soon as it leaves the oven, while it is still hot; the pores of a hot cake are open and the syrup …

In Turkish patisserie gateau cakes are measured by number, and those numbers form a shared language in the trade. When a customer says number one, the same size is in the mind of both the shop and th…

The structure of baklava rests on three elements working together. The pastry is rolled paper-thin and stacked; fat is brushed between every sheet, keeping the layers from bonding and letting them pu…

Homestyle baklava is a structure deliberately set apart from the master baker's version. A master rolls the pastry paper-thin and a tray can hold more than forty layers; pastry rolled at home is thic…

The choice of filling in baklava is not only a matter of taste; the oil content of the nut changes how the structure behaves. Walnut is high in oil and passes some of it into the surrounding pastry d…

Midye baklava takes its name from its closed, curved shape. The pastry is wrapped over the filling and joined at both ends; unlike cut baklava the resulting form is closed on every side. That closure…

Almost the whole baklava family is made of pastry, nuts and syrup, with no dairy. Şöbiyet is the exception — its filling holds cream alongside the pistachio, which changes both the texture and the st…

Tel kadayıf is produced by a method entirely different from pastry. A liquid batter of flour and water is trickled in thin streams from a perforated vessel onto a rotating hot plate; the batter cooks…

The thinness of kadayif strands also makes them easy to influence from what surrounds them. Their surface area is very high; oil released by the filling spreads over the strands and turns into flavou…

The source of the pistachio used in baklava determines the colour of the product directly. Antep pistachios are smaller than other varieties and their kernels are markedly deep green; that colour is …

In dolama baklava the pastry wraps the filling along an axis to form a long cylinder. Sliced, the section that appears is entirely unlike classic cut baklava — there the filling is a thin band, while…