Baklava recipe with pictures

Love baklava? I promise you can make it! it's really not very hard, just very time consuming, and it's one of those things that once you start it you have to finish it in one "sitting". I usually do it after Penni is in bed and Cora has recently nursed and if needed David will take care of her. It takes me probably just under an hour, so plan to be unavailable (for anything but baklava making) for about an hour. Another tip, for the longest time I struggled with filo dough sheets sticking tearing and breaking. I'd end up swearing up and down the avenue and the dough, always would buy and defrost 2 boxes of it knowing that a bunch of it would go to waste.  Turns out I wasn't letting the dough defrost fully! The box said to let it sit at room temperature for 5 hours to thaw, I was giving it that much time but it wasn't enough. Now I usually take it out after breakfast if I know I'll be making the baklava in the evening and let it sit out for a good 10 hours or so. If I'll be making it in the morning for some reason I take it out before bed. When the dough is completely thawed the sheets should come apart nice and easy. Alright here we go...

What you'll need:

1 box of Filo (I started buying the organic whole wheat kind from whole foods)

2.5-3 sticks of butter

1lb of pecans or walnuts, I prefer pecans but most people use walnuts.

1 cup sugar

1tsp. cinnamon

1 1/4-1/2 cup of honey

1/2 lemon's freshly squeezed juice

9x13" glass lasagna pan

a pastry brush

a damp light weight (non-terry) kitchen towel or a cheese cloth

First thing you want to do is run your nuts through the food processor, you want them pretty fine but flour fine, I do them in batches and pulse each batch for about 30 seconds.  To the nuts add the sugar and the cinnamon.

Stir those together and set aside. Put your butter in a pan over low heat to melt. Open your Filo and unroll the sheets, mine are pretty much exactly twice the size of my lasagna pan so I cut them in half and one box of 19 sheets ends up giving me 38 sheets, perfect amount for a baklava. Some sheets are much thinner and you won't need to double your batch, you want close to 40 workable sheets to build a full size baklava. So maybe check the box when you are buying the filo and keep that in mind. So I cut my stack of sheets in half, stack the 2 piles on top of each other and drape a damp cheese cloth over the dough so that it doesn't dry out. Keep it covered! Because the dough is so thin it'll dry out really fast!

So by now your butter should be melted enough to start the baklava building process

Brush the bottom and the sides of your glass pan with a generous layer of melted butter

Then lay one of your filo sheets down and brush it with a pretty generous amount of melted butter. The first sheet is a pain and might slide around on you, so brush the edges against the pan first to keep it in place. and then make sure every inch of that sheet is buttered

For the initial layer if filo you need 8-10 sheets, if math is your thing you can count the amount of sheets you have and then divide them precisely. You'll need  8-10 sheets for first and last layer and 4-5 sheets for each layer in between nut layers, and I usually end up with 4 layers of the nut mixture. 

So get your 8-10 sheets of buttered filo (buttering each sheet as you go) and brush the last one with butter as well

Put about a 1/4 of your nut mixture on top of those 8-10 sheets and spread it out evenly

Cover that with 4-5 sheets of filo, brushing each sheet generously with the melted butter, and remember to keep your pile of non working filo covered with your damp cloth. Yes after every sheet you take, cover it backup. Tedious yes, but that's part of the reason it takes a while to make it. That and the fact that you have to butter each sheet individually. But you've set aside an hour to do this, right? 

So once you put down your 4-5 sheets of filo do another layer of nut mixutre, and keep going like this until the nut mixture is gone. I get 4 layers of nut mixture out of my batch usually. After the last batch of nut mixture is down put 8-10 sheets of filo over that (buttering each one generously). Hear Paula Dean in your head saying "just another stick of butter y'all!" I do haha. Anyways, once you are done your baklava will look like this, more or less. You might have more filo sticking out the sides, maybe less.

Now trim all that extra filo dangling over the sides and overflowing, just cut it all away with a sharp knife. Be gentle, filo is soaked in butter and quite fragile.

Now score your baklava, cut diamond shapes into it, about half way down. If you don't do it know it'll be really hard to cut once it's baked, practically impossible, it'll make the top layer crumble. So score your baklava, please.

Now bake it, at 350 degrees for one hour exactly. When it's done it'll look like this

When there is about 10-15 mins left for baklava to bake start prepping your honey. If you like a sweeter baklava do 1.5 cups of honey, if you like a slightly less sweet one or if your honey is excessively sweet then do 1 and 1/4 cups of honey. Put your honey and the juice of half a lemon in a small/medium pot and heat it over low/medium heat. You don't want to boil it or burn it, so keep stirring it pretty frequently, it should get very runny, almost like water. Side note, it doesn't matter if your honey is runny or solid when you are starting off, either way it'll melt and work just fine.

Once baklava is done baking take it out and let it sit for a few mins while you finish waiting for the honey to melt to almost water type of runny. Once the honey is melted pour it all over the top of baklava making sure it gets into every crack. It'll seem like a lot but it'll be delicious! Get it all on there. I like to let it rest over night, if you HAVE to have it asap then at least let it fully and completely cool. But seriously, let it rest over night, you'll be glad you did. Voila!

Remember that it's just scored and not cut all the way through, so before trying to serve it take a good knife and cut it all the way down along the score lines, and run your knife along the edge. Enjoy!