M’HANNSHA

almond spirals

A variation on the Gazelle’s Horns (page 102), these spirals have the almond paste wrapped in warqa (the Moroccan equivalent of phyllo; see page 69) and shaped into a coil before being baked until slightly crisp and lightly colored. They are much quicker to prepare than Gazelle’s Horns, and if you cannot find warqa (or brik, as the pastry is also known), simply use a very thin Greek or Turkish phyllo. You can, if you want, make the almond rolls much thinner to yield forty pastries instead of twenty. They look prettier, but I often make them larger because they take less time.

MAKES 20 LARGE OR 40 DAINTY PASTRIES

filling

3³/₄ cups [500 g] blanched almonds

1¹/₄ cups [150 g] confectioners’ sugar

¹/₄ cup [60 ml] orange blossom water

2 Tbsp unsalted butter, at room temperature

6 to 8 grains mastic (see page 55), finely ground in a small mortar with a pestle to yield ¹/₂ tsp powdered mastic

One 14-oz [400-g] package phyllo pastry (the sheets I used measured 11¹/₂ by 16³/₄ in [29 by 42 cm])

¹/₂ cup plus 2 Tbsp [150 g] unsalted butter, melted

To make the filling: Place the almonds in a heatproof bowl; pour in enough boiling water to cover and let sit for 1 hour. Drain the almonds well and dry them with a clean kitchen towel.

Combine the almonds with the confectioners’ sugar in a food processor. Process until very finely ground, about 2 minutes. Add the orange blossom water, butter, and mastic and process until well blended. Transfer the paste to your work surface and roll into a sausage shape. Divide into 20 equal pieces and shape each piece into first a ball and then into a thin cylinder measuring about 9 in [22.5 cm] long. Cover with plastic wrap.

Preheat the oven to 400°F [200°C]. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a silicone baking mat.

Lay one sheet of phyllo on your work surface and brush with a little melted butter. Lay one almond cylinder about ¹/₂ in [12 mm] away from the edge nearest you, and about ³/₄ in [2 cm] away from the edges of the phyllo. Flap the phyllo over the almond cylinder and roll, keeping the phyllo very close to the filling as you roll the pastry over it. Brush with butter and, with the seam side down, fold one empty end over the almond roll and roll into a spiral, sliding the other empty end under the coil.

Transfer the coil to the prepared baking sheet and press lightly on it to make sure it doesn’t unroll during baking. Make the remaining spirals the same way. When you have finished them, poke each one here and there with a toothpick to keep the pastry from puffing.

Bake until golden, 25 minutes. Let cool on a wire rack. Store in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 1 week.

phyllo pastry

Phyllo is the name Greeks use to describe dough of any kind, not only the very thin sheets of dough we know as phyllo. Despite the Greek name, the origin of phyllo is Turkish. An eleventh-century dictionary of local Turkish dialects (Diwan Lughat al-Turk) recorded “pleated or folded bread” as one meaning for the word yurgha, archaic for yufka, which is the Turkish name for phyllo. Yufka also refers to sheets of thin dough of various thicknesses, none of which can be described as thick. In Arab countries, phyllo is known as reqaqat (“thinned out” in Arabic).

Before World War I, elegant households in Istanbul kept two phyllo makers, one to make the thin sheets for baklava and the other to make the thicker sheets used in böreks. Though less common nowadays, there are many traditional households in Turkey that still make phyllo at home.

More and more contemporary professional bakers use mechanical rollers because the rollers are less labor-intensive. Whether by hand or by machine, the work is done in a room dedicated to both rolling out the pastry and shaping the different types of baklava. The men in charge—and these professional kitchens are truly a man’s world—work at long rectangular tables with marble tops cloaked in clouds of cornstarch, used to keep the sheets of pastry from sticking to each other. The bakers start by rolling out balls of dough into thick disks measuring about 10 in [25 cm] across, which are then stacked and sprinkled with cornstarch. Each stack will have more than 12 disks. To stretch the sheets by hand, the men use very long, straight wooden rolling pins to roll out the stack until the sheets are ten times the width they were and so thin you can read a newspaper through them. Then they roll their sheets around the rolling pin and stretch the sheets further by cupping their hands around them and gently pulling the roll of pastry up and down.

When the rolling out is done by machine, the man in charge of the rolling machine places one stack in the center of a large wooden table and lowers a plastic mechanical roller that is almost as wide as the table onto the stack. The roller goes back and forth over the stack, each time pressing it down to stretch the dough. The wooden table swivels a quarter turn with each rolling out so that the sheets are flattened to a perfect circle. Once the pastry sheets have been stretched almost as wide as the table, the baker rolls the sheets onto a large rolling pin and hands it to a young boy to take to those in charge of shaping the baklava or other sweets.

You can find excellent commercial phyllo and yufka at Middle Eastern markets or by mail order. Phyllo sheets tear easily, and they dry very quickly if not kept covered—I cover with plastic wrap and a kitchen towel over that.