This Easy Homemade Baklava recipe is a dessert that came from the Ottoman Empire, which for decades has been and remains one of the most favorite desserts on our tables for the holidays, thus becoming one of the favorite desserts of the Albanian tradition. In Albanian tradition, we can not imagine the New Year Eve table without Baklava dessert, so, in this article, we will show you today how to cook it.

As for Kadaif Recipe, every one of us has her way or recipe for preparing baklava, and we are sharing with you our family recipe for this dessert.

It is one of the tastiest and simplest recipes you can have tried. Nowadays, baklava cooks with nuts, hazelnuts, pistachios, and the best one is with nuts, a delicious taste of phyllo dough cooked with butter and eggs, which melt in the mouth after baking and serving. We have been cooking this recipe in our family for years, and it is one of our favorites, which we want to share with you today.

Baklava used to cook mainly for the end-of-year holidays, but it is a dessert that we can cook for any other family joy we desire. I invite you to read and follow carefully the instructions below for its preparation, which is not difficult as it seems. You can choose to use ready-made phyllo dough for cooking baklava or buying it cooked in confectionery.
When we prepare phyllo dough and roll it from our own hands is one of the keys to realizing delicious, crunchy, and fragrant baklava. You will see that when baklava cooks by your hands for your family and friends, it has a different taste.

Some Tips To cook a Delicious Baklava.

In my opinion, the main secret of cooking this dessert is choosing fresh and high-quality ingredients.

One of the main ingredients for the baklava is butter. You should choose butter carefully and buy organic butter and not processed butter, which often mixes with other ingredients. We use fresh organic butter that we melt ourselves. The butter should melt and eliminate the part of the milk or buttermilk that has butter inside. For this, we will need to melt the butter and boil it until it forms a foam on top. We add a little salt, and the buttermilk will leave at the bottom of the pot. Let it cool a bit, drain it and use it lukewarm. You can even keep it for a long time. It is also a way of preserving butter.
• The second significant ingredient for the baklava is the nuts, which we choose from the country nuts, fresh, and produced this year, which we tear and clean ourselves, providing clean, white, and recent kernels. You can choose to buy even peeled ones, but be careful choosing the best quality, and the nuts are not old, stale, retain moisture, mold odor, or other unpleasant odors, which will make you damage all work with baklava, and your effort will be in vain.
• Eggs should also be fresh and organically grown. We use for cooking village eggs baklava from our relatives or trusted farmer. Preparing the dough with fresh eggs gives a delicious flavor to the dough and makes it more crumbly during baking and after serving.
• Flour is one of the ingredients that you should choose in high quality when it comes to dough preparation. You need to purchase flour, which can roll fast and lightly so that we can prepare the phyllo dough and layers, and the process of opening the baklava’s layers will be as simple as possible for you.
•The yogurt you will use to knead the dough should also be organic. Use homemade yogurt for more flavor.
• The syrup is another factor that affects much tasty baklava, and we cook it using the right quantity of water and sugar. Do not forget to add lemon juice so that it does not crumble on days in follow, and above all, take care that the syrup added warm when the baklava has drained and cooled after baking. We flavor the syrup with our favorite aromas.

Ingredients

Ingredients for the Phyllo Dough

1 kg of flour
400 ml of yogurt
2 -eggs
5 egg yolks
125 ml of melted butter
125 ml of corn oil
1 tbsp of lemon juice
a little salt
500 g corn starch for rolling the phyllo dough

For the baklava filling

700 -800 g nuts kernel
500 g of melted butter
100 ml of corn oil

For the syrup

2kg of granulated sugar
1.5 l of water
2 tbsp of lemon juice
favorite aromas like lemon zest, vanilla extract, cinnamon, or dry basil.

Directions

Once we have prepared all the ingredients on the work table for kneading the dough, we will proceed with the dough. Make sure to melt the butter as explained above and cleaned the nuts before kneading the dough.
We will first sift the flour into a wide, deep bowl. In another bowl, we will add the eggs, egg yolks and mix them with the yogurt until it becomes a homogeneous mass. We will add lemon juice and butter mixed with oil. Mix them well, and we will knead the dough with it. We work the dough well. The dough should come out soft. You will see for yourself, but if necessary, you can add two tablespoons of yogurt because it depends on the flour.
Put the dough in a glass bowl and cover it with a plastic paper. Let it rest for one hour and start rolling it.
First, we divide the dough into two parts. Divide each dough past into ten more small dough parts, and each one from these ten, we separate into five smaller dough parts. We let aside the other half of the dough
covered with a kitchen napkin to not dry while roll other parts. As I say, we divide each dough part into five smaller ones, which we open into small circles as small as a hand with a little starch. We will make these five layers together, sprinkling with corn starch between them, and roll it in a single large and thin layer. Continue like this until the end of the dough.
We will place the thinned phyllo layers in a clean kitchen cover at a distance from each other do not stick and let them dry a little.
When we finish with rolling and the baklava layers dried somewhat, we will start laying the baklava.
We will grind the peeled walnuts in a kitchen shredder to make them smaller, but not flour. Walnuts should be felt in the mouth when tasting baklava. We will lay 4-5 layers in a baking pan, sprinkling the phyllo noodles with butter mixed with oil so that it does not freeze us, and we will throw a layer of groundnuts. We will repeat this process by laying layers and adding nuts in every 4-5 baklava layers, closing the baklava with four layers on the surface.
We will cut the baklava into sections, and each of them into rows, and each row, we cut nicely into rhombus-shaped.
We will carefully bake it in the preheated oven at 180 degrees for 15 minutes. After that, we low the oven temperature to 140 degrees and bake it for about 2 hours up to 2 hours and 30 minutes. All layers of baklava should turn golden reddish. We will let the baklava cool completely before adding the syrup.
Once the baklava cool, we will prepare the syrup and add it warm to the baklava, which is cold. Let it soften for at least two days before serving and enjoying it. The longer the baklava stays in the syrup, the better it will become. Therefore, all housewives prepare baklava for the holidays in advance. If you have not yet cooked your baklava, you can try our recipe, which we guarantee is very tasty.