Baklava in Berlin

Time Out Berlin's food editor Tommy Tannock indulges his sweet tooth to unearth some of Berlin’s best baklava…

Within our Western diet, we have nothing approaching the ubiquity of that golden-skinned, Levantine delicacy Baklava. It’s eaten as a celebratory dish during festivals as well as just as a sweet treat to accompany the gallons of tea, sickly-sweetened black or headily-scented mint, that are knocked back daily all along the near-Orient. One would never see a pair of gruff, bearded lads meeting up after work over kaffee und kuchen, as you would the hordes of men sitting round tables, dissecting the day, fingers stained with nicotine and baklava grease. The seemingly endless layers of buttery filo are painstakingly built up until combining in solidity - a metaphor for the region’s turbulent history and tribal to-ing and fro-ing.

Nuts baked in dough were most likely a Turkic invention from as far back as the 9th Century, but different areas have subsequently added ingredients to suit local tastes; fragrant cardamon and rosewater for Persians, blanched almonds for Azeris. It took the magnificent largesse of the Ottomans though, to truly perfect the dish as we know it today - the laborious process of rolling out paper-thin sheets of dough perfected at the colossal kitchens of Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. There, the enlightened Sultan called for specialists from all over his empire, pulling in cooks from Budapest to Basra. Alongside the empire’s iron grip of the spice roads, the capital’s culinary mores quickly spread out in imitation to all the regional rulers’ houses thus normalizing tastes along vast swathes of the Balkans, Central Asia and Middle East.

Like all emblematic dishes, baklava has numerous claimants to its invention, but it’s the Anatolian city of Gaziantep, famed for its elegant pistachios, whose tourist board seems to have lucked out on this occasion. Originally a Hellenistic centre, the city went back and forth between the Byzantine Empire and successive Islamic dynasties until being at last taken by the Seljuks in 1067. The Seljuks (a Turkic tribal peoples living north of the Aral Sea) began to slowly assimilate emirates throughout Anatolia, taken from the crumbling empire of the decadent Byzantines. The Seljuks themselves depended upon a highly-trained vassal army of Turkomans, the Mamluks, who repeatedly throughout history outgrew their masters and reversed the power order. This Cairo-based sultanate was eventually subjugated by the Ottomans during their remarkable 16th Century expansion in which the famed Suleiman the Magnificent also reigned. It was this Sultan that not only oversaw the Golden Age of Ottoman culture, rewrote the entire empire’s legal system, massively expanded its borders but most importantly, constructed the gargantuan kitchens which housed over 800 staff and where baklava was perfected.

The delicate filo pastry dough must be repeatedly rolled and stretched, with careful flouring to prevent tears, until reaching an almost paper-like transparency and thinness. This is then brushed with samna (clarified butter) ideally made from a mixture of sheep and goat milk, and another layer of filo laid on top. This process is repeated until reaching the desired thickness, then a layer of some variety of chopped nut, is sprinkled and then another layer of pastry built up. Sadly, the strong lamb-like taste of this samna is not to Western tastes and it’s extremely difficult to find it made traditionally outside of a home kitchen. Nowadays, good quality bakeries will use butter while the cheap, packaged variety tend towards cheap, synthetic vegetable shortening. These trays of raw baklava are chopped into squares, triangles or slices, then baked in a moderate oven to prevent burning. Once removed, a sugar syrup (a closely guarded secret in most recipes but essentially boiled sugar, sometimes honey, dissolved in water and some spice or flavouring) is poured over it. The syrup sweetens and acts as a glue giving the fragile filo some body, but also leaves the hands and mouth satisfyingly sticky.

Much like the humble döner, there seems to be a head-spinning over-abundance of fresh bakeries, particularly in the two Turkish strongholds of Wedding and Neukölln, so here’s the pick of the bunch.

Agam Baklava

There are two branches of this popular baklavari. The one near Gesundbrunnen is actually just a small outlet (for take away and trade attached to a main bakery); and the other on Müllerstrasse, more of a café with seating. The shop’s owners are from Gaziantep (or that’s the claim) and the bustling men in stained whites who were fussing over the trays of pre-baked baklava in their backroom certainly looked the part. Also, the smaller shop had a healthy early-evening queue of gruff men perhaps on a begrudging family errand. There were a number of choices, from the straight pistachioed baklava, to saray sarmasi (surrounding the Palace – slices of rolled tubular baklava). These are all satisfyingly packed on a tray first dusted with ground pistachio, then given another liberal sprinkling at the end.

Agam Baklava, Stettinerstrasse 10, 
13357 Berlin (030 691 4941). U8 Gesundbrunnen. Open 7am-8pm daily.

Umkalthum Backerei

Near the top of Sonnenallee, a solidly middle-Eastern outpost in a majority Turkish area, this bakery has been banging out Syrian and Lebanese sweets for over a decade. Their pistachio offerings sell out early in the day, and for the afternoon they bake their baklavas with a cashew filling. They are certainly much drier than the Turkish variety, denser too, with honey used in the syrup. Alongside the multitude of pastries, they serve maamul (very short biscuit dough encasing nuts or dates) as well as lots of rather baroque cakes overly laden with ornately piped cream and maraschino cherries.

Umkalthum, Sonnenallee 50, 12045 Berlin (0172 309 3304). U8 Herrmannplatz. Open 7am-close daily.

Pasam Baklava

A clear favourite amongst the Berlin food bloggerati, Pasam carries with it a whiff of the Ottoman’s faded grandeur, a high-ceilinged brown-toned room with just one imposing cabinet displaying their eight or so varieties (some may have sold out at this point) of baklava. There is the usual mock detritus of ‘oriental’ knick-knacks dotted about the place, large Hellenestic pewter jugs and a curved scimitar hanging above the entrance to the kitchen. The Ottomans themselves very much equated the prestige of the kitchen with that of the military. The Sultan’s personal guard, the Jannissaries, were hand-picked Christian children trained into an elite fighting force and were given ritual honorifics like ‘Chief Cook’, ‘Baker’ and ‘Pancake Maker’ to denote status. It’s oddly situated in the lonely no man’s land around Yorckstr. station but the baklava are hands down the best of the bunch. In the same way so much ice cream is drowned out by cloying sweetness due to insipid ingredients, the pistachio here is a distinct presence in the mouth and punctuated by the glorious wash of rich butter. Their other offerings include baklava with walnuts, sobiyet (with semolina porridge) and some rather dusty looking biscuits stacked in a side cabinet.

Pasam, Goebenstrasse 12A, 10783 Berlin (030 219 62383, www.pasam-baklava.de). U7 Yorckstrasse. Open 10am-8pm daily.