Ann Ohanian taught David how to make this traditional Armenian dessert. It has the same ingredients as paklava (aka baklava), but the filo dough is shredded and fluffy.
Here’s the recipe – it’s mostly quite easy; the tedious part is working the butter into the shredded dough. The dough is usually fairly compressed together and is a bit dry and fragile. The trick is to just be slow and patient with it. The only other comment is that I’ve got a pair of matched 9x9x2 pans that have a wide lip. This makes flipping over the khadayeef reasonable easy.
Ingredients:
2 9x9x2 baking pans
1 lb pkg. of Athens (or Apollo brand) Shredded Fillo Dough (KATAIFI), at room temperature
1 ½ sticks unsalted butter, melted
½ cup milk (or almond milk)
Syrup:
2 cups sugar
1 ½ cup water
1 tsp lemon juice
Filling:
1 cup finely chopped walnuts
1 tsp cinnamon
1 ½ tbsp sugar
Procedure:
- Boil sugar and water together for 5 min or until the sugar is thoroughly dissolved.
- Set aside to cool and add lemon juice to the syrup
- Combine the walnuts, sugar and cinnamon in a small bowl and set aside. (I usually start with finely crushed walnuts from the local middle-east store and chop them a bit more in a small food processor or coffee grinder)
- Loosen pastry with hands and discard any course particles. Pastry should be fresh and moist. If not, sprinkle with a few spoonfuls of milk to moisten it. Spoon about ¾ of the melted butter over the pastry, working it in gently with your hands to coat the pastry evenly.
- Spread ½ the pastry into a 9×9 baking pan. Pat down very gently. Layer the walnut mixture evenly over the top. Top with the remaining pastry.
- Spoon or brush the remaining butter over the top. Pat down gently.
- Bake in a pre heated 350° oven for about 35 min. or until lightly golden on top. Remove from the oven.
- Spoon the ½ cup of milk (almond milk is fine too) evenly over the top and cover with a clean, dampened cloth (I use a clean dishtowel). Make sure that the cloth is in contact with the top of the Khadayeef. This helps soften the pastry and keeps it from drying out. Set aside for an hour or more.
- When the Khadayeef has cooled, pour the cooled syrup evenly over the top. Cover again with the damp cloth as above. Set aside for about an hour.
- Carefully invert the contents of the pan into an identical size pan. Set aside for several hours or more. This is important so that the syrup is evenly absorbed throughout the Khadayeef to soften the texture.
- If desired, invert the Khadayeef again before cutting.