A Favorite Armenian Lunch

My physical therapist put me in touch with his mother, Maggie Saab (right), to learn how to cook Armenian food. Click at right for the story, the recipes, and how-to photos.

The Recipe - Baklava

As Maggie Saab, whose family was from Kilis, Armenia (now part of Turkey), taught Lindsay Sterling in Falmouth, MA, in August 2015.

Cooking time: 1 hr (plus the phyllo needs to thaw overnight)

Makes about 40 pieces

1 box phyllo dough

2 cups sugar

1 cup water

1 tsp lemon juice

1 Tbsp rose water*

1 package phyllo dough*

4 Tbsp unsalted butter, melted

12 oz. walnuts

2 tsp cinnamon

crushed unsalted pistachio (optional)*

Unusual Equipment needed:

Pastry brush

parchment paper

*Note: you may have to order the asterisk-ed ingredients online or find them a a Middle Eastern market near you. Phyllo dough is in the freezer in a rectangular box.

(Click "See How to Do It" at right to see the photos of how to make this. Cooking is much easier when you see how it's done first.)

Thaw the phyllo dough. Put it in refrigerator a night or day before using. If possible, an hour before assembling the pastry, take the phyllo out of box and let it come to room temperature on the counter. Leave it in its plastic bag though so it doesn't dry out. This all makes the dough easiest to work with. Also, it's best to make the syrup ahead of time, too, but not necessary.

Make the syrup. In a small sauce pan, bring sugar and water to a boil, stirring a little bit so that the sugar melts into the water. Let boil, add lemon juice, and turn heat down to medium-low for about ten minutes. Turn off heat. Once cooled, add rose water, and cool further in the fridge. 

Preheat the oven to 375. 

Make the filling. Pulse walnuts in a food processor so that you have a crumbly mixture of nuts, with most pieces about a quarter of an inch or less. Put into a medium sized bowl. Stir in cinnamon and just enough of the syrup so that the mixture kind of holds together but not all the way. You may choose to use honey if your syrup isn't ready yet.

Roll the filling into the phyllo. Melt your butter in the microwave or on the stove. Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper. Open the phyllo dough and unroll it so that the stack of rectangular sheets lays flat. Clear a clean workspace in front of you. Have teh butter, phyllo and cookie sheet handy. Take two sheets of the phyllo dough off the stack and lay them in front of you on the counter, with the the longest edge facing you. (Cover the stack of phyllo dough with a clean towel when you're done so the phyllo doesn't dry out and break.) Brush a thin layer of butter on the top sheets that you just placed in front of you. Take another two pieces of phyllo dough from the stack and lay them right on top of the ones in front of you. Brush the top layer with butter. Then make an inch-thick row of the nut mixture on the phyllo along the edge closest to you.  Roll the phyllo layers over the filling as tightly as you can, squeezing the nuts once they're enclosed, to get them into the cylinder shape. Continue rolling away from you through the rest of the phyllo dough so that you end up with a long cylinder that's about an inch in diameter. 

Bake, sweeten, and serve. Put the roll of baklava on the cookie sheet lined with parchment. Brush the top of the roll with butter, and use a paring knife to cut across the roll at a diagonal making pieces that are about an inch wide. Make more rolls just like the first until you run out of filling. Bake the baklava until golden, 15-20 minutes. Remove from the oven and immediately spoon the cool syrup slowly over each roll. Listen to it sizzle. The syrup will pool a little below each row by about a half of an inch, but don't worry. Over time the hot pastry will suck up all the syrup. Sprinkle the tops of the pastry with crushed unsalted pistachios if you like. Present the pieces in a pretty shape like a spiral or concentric circles on a platter. 

Copyright Lindsay Sterling 2015

See How To Do It

 Here are some pics to use along with the recipes so you can see what each stage looks like. Click at right for the recipes.

Armenian Itch

Fine grain bulgur wheat:

After you stir in the wheat, you cover the pot off the heat and the wheat soaks up the delicious liquid.

After it sits for a while, it turns into a thick paste, like this:

People scoop up bites with fresh lettuce, cabbage or grape leaves. The leaves pictured below Ali plucked right off a concord grape vine in his back yard. 

 Baklava

She takes two sheets at a time of phyllo dough. Butters the top layer, and then adds another two pieces on top of that, then butters again. Then she lays down the nut filling in a row.

 Butter the top of each roll before slicing into bite-sized pieces.

Here is the rose water that she adds to her simple syrup, which she pours over the baklava right when it comes out of the oven. It sizzles and the baklava sucks up all the sweet syrup. It's awesome. For some reason that sizzle is so satisfying!

Burek

Her cheese filling is a mixture of garden parsley, crumbled feta, and shredded Muenster.

Again, she uses two sheets at a time (right on top of each other). Then she cuts it into long rectangles.

She just butters the edges because when the cheese melts it adds fat then, too. 

Put filling in the bottom, fold the phyllo over to make a triangle shape, and then fold the triangle shape like flag over and over up the rectangle until you can't fold any more. 

Butter the tops and sprinkle sesame seeds on. 

What a lovely day! Thank you Maggie and Ali!

This is Ali playing the oud, an ancestor of the guitar. He played an arabic song form called a samai that was in mostly 10/8 time. New to my ears! Lovely, Ali!

The Story

Armenian Cooking Secrets:

Live Music and a Tablespoon of Rose Water

By Lindsay Sterling

When my physical therapist, Amin Saab, in Brunswick heard about my quest to learn a dish from every country in the world, he connected me with his Armenian mother in Cape Cod. In August, she and I sat together on her back porch, overlooking a beach packed with orange parasols. Over the sounds of distant waves crashing and kids playing, Maggie Saab told me the story of the foods she was about to teach me how to cook.

The first dish was called itch in Armenian. It’s a tangy vegetarian paste eaten with mint and fresh lettuce, cabbage, or grape leaves. To make itch, you sauté diced yellow onion in oil and then add tomato paste, water, generous salt, and a couple tablespoons of sumac. Once the liquid is boiling, then you stir in fine-grain bulgur wheat, cover the pot, and let the wheat soak up the liquid.

Maggie’s parents, who lived in the small Armenian town of Kilis (which is today part of Turkey), made this dish when they cleaned the house and did laundry because it was easy to prepare and eat for lunch. “During the Armenian genocide in 1915,” Maggie explained, “They escaped through the hot desert to Aleppo, Syria, where I was born.” When Maggie was eighteen, her aunt helped her get a scholarship at a nursing program at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon. At school she got on a bus to go skiing with some classmates. There were a handful of medical students in the back of the bus playing live music. “I go crazy for music,” Maggie explained, “I love to sing.” The musicians called out to her group, “Come and sit with us!” Maggie did. The young man who was playing the oud, an ancient stringed instrument, would become her husband (the father of my physical therapist).

As the bulgur wheat dish was resting, Maggie showed me how to make cheese burek, a collection of flakey triangles of cheese-filled pastry, and baklava, a dessert of crushed walnuts and cinnamon. Maggie prefers to make her baklava in long rolls, which she slices crosswise at a diagonal into bite-sized, rounded nuggets. She also likes to add a tablespoon of rose water to the cooled syrup before pouring it over the hot pastry.

Maggie laid platters of the itch, burek, and baklava on the table on the back porch along with plates of sliced farmer’s cheese, olives, pita bread, and fresh garden herbs. Maggie’s husband, Ali, joined us for a lunch. I asked if Maggie being a Christian and Ali being a Muslim was ever a problem, and they said it never was. When they got married, though, Maggie was worried about one thing. “I didn’t even know how to cook rice!” Ali had worked in his parents’ restaurants in Lebanon and helped her learn how to cook. As they lived in the Boston area for almost forty years, Maggie picked up cooking secrets from Armenian friends and family, too.

Through the years Ali has continued studying and practicing the oud. It seemed fitting to ask him to play something, considering his music was responsible for bringing us together. He played a song form called samai. Its changing time signatures and microtones (notes between Western music notes) opened my mind and heart to the vastness of the beauty inherent in our world.

Click at right for the recipes and how-to-photos.

Copyright Lindsay Sterling 2015