Passport & Plate - Injir Baklava
Ingredients
For the baklava
300 grams unsalted pork fat (or sheep tallow)
125 grams of butter
5 teacups of flour
1 egg
1 cupful ashen water
1 cupful sugar
Pinch of salt
Vanilla sugar
Cloves
For the syrup
3 teacups of sugar
4 teacups of water
Half a lemon
How to prepare this recipeWe beat well with a mixer the fat, the butter, the sugar, the egg, the salt, the vanilla and the ashen water. All the ingredients should be set at room temperature. If we can, we should find purified and unsalted fat. Ashy water is done in a coffee cup of water add a spoon fine wood ash.
We add to the fatty mixture the flour little by little, while mixing till we reach the desired texture. The proportions should be fine, but however we should be careful because if the baklava is too hard, it will not soak well, and if it is too soft, the shortbread will fall apart.
We knead the dough for a while as if it for real shortbread, than leave it for 15 minutes in the freezer.
After that we shape quickly the dough as meatballs, than flatten then and make a hole in the middle with a finger. We stick in a clove or a walnut.
We arrange all the baklavas in a lightly greased pan and bake at preheated at 200 C oven for about 15 minutes or until slightly golden brown.
We leave the dry injir baklava overnight.
We boil the syrup for 12-13 minutes, adding the half of the lemon at the very beginning. We pour carefully with a ladle half of the syrup over the baklava and leave the other half to boil for another 6-7 minutes.
We leave the dry injir baklava overnight. On the next morning the baklavas should be all soaked and ready. We serve them with a glass of cold water.
We should prepare the ashen water with ashes from wood and if possible - with orange blossom water or rose water.
The story behind this recipeThis type of baklava was prepared by my great-grand mother and my grandmother only once in the year, just after Christmas, on Saint Stephen's Day. They have been doing this for tens of years, and their grandmothers have been preparing injir baklava before them during the times when Bulgaria was still part of the Ottoman Empire.
The weird thing is that only recently I found out that such a baklava is virtually unknown in Turkey or the Middle East and is prepared by Bulgarian ladies only in 2 small towns in Northern Bulgaria - Troyan and Lovech.
The rich and fatty baklava was the most delicious treat after the hardest Orthodox Christmas fasting and my great-grandmother allowed us only to have one baklava per day, even though we were not fasting during the communist times before 1989. I still remember the lemony taste, the snow, the old oil stove in the kitchen and the joy of the holidays which by that time started for real after Christmas.
Even more my great-grandmother and my grandma had their name-days on St. Stephen, and later on my younger sister, so the baklava was the celebration of femininity and the men from the family had to be gentle the whole day.
My grand mother died a couple of years ago and I never had the chance to prepare injir baklava along with her, but my sister was insisting that we should keep the tradition. We tried hard to restore the proportions of the ingredients, questioning aunts and old ladies from my ancestor's hometown Lovech.
Last Christmas was the first time I prepared injir baklava all by myself. My mother, my sister, my aunt and me celebrated an all-women St. Stephen's Day with baklava just like we did 30 years ago, and like my grandmother 130 years ago.
