L U N A T A L K with Eva Moon

The Magi had it easy…

December 6, 2009 on 4:41 pm | | In Food, General Musing

They may have trekked hundreds of miles through trackless deserts, but didn’t try to find phyllo dough in Redmond.

It’s not that there isn’t any. Actually, there’s quite a bit - they had it at six of the seven stores I went to. But it’s gone through a transformation that echoes the current economic recession: It’s been downsized.

Phyllo dough, if you don’t know, is tissue paper-thin sheets of dough which I have layered with butter, nuts, cinnamon and sugar to make baklava every December for the past twenty years at least. My great-grandmother used to make her own phyllo, but as soon as machine-made dough became available, boy did that stop. So now, unless you’re some kind of baking survivalist Luddite, you buy it in the freezer section of the supermarket. It comes in a box of 12″x18″ sheets - the ideal size and quantity in one box to make one pan of baklava. A little trim to the stack of sheets and it’s a perfect fit in a standard 11″x17″ pan.

Until this year.

For some inexplicable but surely evil reason, phyllo dough sheets have shrunk to 9″x14″ while my pans have stubbornly clung to their former dimensions. The phyllo has to fit the pan. You can’t have a stack of sheets in the middle of a pan and a syrup moat. Trust me on this or go look at the recipe for yourself.

I went to six markets: Safeway, QFC, Fred Meyer, Target, Trader Joe’s and Top Food. Five of them had phyllo - all in the cute new useless miniature size. I considered stopping by Office Depot for a quire of tabloid-size sheets of tissue paper. Enough butter and sugar and who would know? In the aisle of Top Food, I caved: Enough already! I’ll buy smaller pans!

At Bed, Bath & Beyond, they had 9×12″ pans, but only nonstick. The thing about nonstick pans: One knife slice and zip, they’re ruined. To a nonstick pan, baklava is “death by a thousand cuts.”

The BB&B clerk commiserated. “There’s not a plain baking pan anywhere in the northwest outside a restaurant supply store. It’s all nonstick. Everything. Maybe you could bake cookies? The nonstick pans are great for cookies.”

I stomped out, muttering.

“One more store. I’m going to one more store and that’s it. The end of an era. We might as well get a plastic tree and a blow-up Chilly Willy yard decoration because it won’t really be Christmas anyway.”

But lo! A star rose in the frozen food aisle! Whole Foods had 12×18″ phyllo sheets! Organic too. Pah-rum-pah-pum-pum. I am saved!

And you are too! The first two people not already on the ‘get some’ list who reply to this blog post will get a box of my baklava in the mail.

See more like that one:

• Chopping List
• Day 15: Which Way to the Egress?
• Day 13: Juice of Affliction, Chili of Salvation
• Day 11: The Wall
• Week 2: A Keeper Recipe