Who will make the world’s best baklava now?
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Twenty five years ago we would travel to the inner Sydney suburb of Surrey Hills to buy the middle eastern sweet, baklava.
All rose syrup, pistachios, honey and paper thin pastry, its exotic allure was enough for us to make a two-hour trip from our coastal hippy farm life into the urban cacophony of inner fringe suburbs like Surry Hills, Newtown and Redfern.
Ten years later we found baklava again, this time on a road called Sydney, in the Melbourne suburb of Collingwood.
For a decade, trips to Melbourne saw us return with the great Tasmanian gastronomic juxtaposition – Crispy Crème donuts from the less tantalising Tullamarine domestic terminal and elaborate plastic trays of baklava from Sydney Road, Collingwood.
Even greater baklava joy was found on when we visited a GP mate, locuming on Magnetic Island.
The doctor he replaced was Lebanese and the good doc’s mum had left us a 600mm circular plastic ``welcome’’ tray filled with ever decreasing, syrupy circles of baklava – varying shapes but unmistakable syrupy sweet nuttiness `AAH, baklava’.
Even in the heat of far North Queensland, on a culturally desert island, we found joy in baklava, poolside with short black coffees – oh the luxury.
Somewhere in between, I discovered that the making of baklava was comparatively simple.
Baklava is probably as difficult a recipe as the Aussie classic, caramel slice. Baking my own baklava took me on a journey.
The sensory alchemy of rosewater and honeyed syrup-soaked sheets of paper-thin pastry, spread with the nutty richness of pistachio, almonds and walnuts the result sticky enough to bind to the roof of your mouth and just willing and waiting for a mouth full of jet coffee to flush it down.
Such bliss!
Baking also took me into my friend Nina’s Lebanese kitchen of the ‘80s.
With Spaniard Julio Iglesias providing our Saturday afternoon baking soundtrack we were transported East to places of dreams like her home, Beirut.
Baking baklava took me back to the Istanbul of my youth where at 21 I found the grand bazaar, sweet tea, sweeter baklava and con-men who weren’t shy at pinching a western arse when squeezed tight on city buses.
It’s a pity life can’t be more like a giant, gilded, plastic tray of baklava. That is, overflowing with generosity and optimism.
If you’ve never experienced the way Arabs, Greeks or Turks do pastry, you’ve missed one of the great expressions of generosity.
Shops specialising in middle eastern pastries make French patisserie and chocolatier look demure and meagre.
The pastries are usually cut to bite size, short black perfection but the display cabinets and the giant scale of the serving trays suggest that most people don’t stop at a single syrupy bite.
About 10 years ago, my husband stumbled across `The World’s Best Baklava’.
The World’s Best Baklava wasn’t in Istanbul, Damascus or Beirut but at a small family run supermarket in North Hobart.
For a decade, my husband’s North Hobart ritual involved a bowl of soup at the Italian Pantry, a walk up the hill to the North Hobart food strip for a chat with the owner of the A&B Food Store, before taking a small tray of her baklava to enjoy at a movie across the road at the State Cinema.
Last Sunday, Tasmania Police charged a man with the murder of a “popular” and “hardworking” 68-year- old shopkeeper who owned and operated the small supermarket and also happened to make the `World’s Best Baklava’.
For a month I have been asking `Why?’ Why Orlando? Why Dallas, why Nice, why Munich?
RIP