With so few ingredients, how good can this recipe be?

Time: 1 hr 20 minutes

Difficulty: 1/5

Ingredient Availability: 5/5

While phyllo dough is often used in baklava, it is more versatile than you may think. While this recipe layers multiple sheets of the thin dough like in baklava, it shows that it can be cooked in more ways than one. I decided to make this recipe because it required very few ingredients that I didn’t already have and the steps were very simple. I wanted to know whether or not the recipe could become something much greater than the sum of its parts.

Key Ingredients & Omissions:

Given how few ingredients there are in this recipe, it would be one where leaving something out would give you a pretty different result. Nothing was left out of this recipe. I will note that I’ve never been able to find Demerara sugar, so I’ve always substituted it with Turbinado sugar.

Tools:

• Bread/serrated knife

Cooking Review:

Making sugar mix: 5 minutes

While I worked on melting my butter in the microwave, warming it in 30 second intervals at 50% power, I mixed the cardamom and sugar with a pinch of salt.

Layering & Rolling: 18 minutes

This is the hardest part of the recipe and it’s not hard at all. I took the first layer of phyllo dough and brushed it with butter before sprinkling my sugar mix evenly over it. The next sheet was put over the first and was brushed with more butter and sprinkled with sugar. These two layers were then rolled together and set aside while the steps taken to make that roll were repeated, stopping just before rolling to put the first roll on top. Placing, the initial roll on the edge of the newly layered dough, everything was rolled together and set aside. This was repeated two more times until a total of 8 layers had been rolled together. To finish everything, a final layer of dough was wrapped around the log, with care taken not to tear it.

Chilling, Slicing, and baking: 45 minutes

Once everything had been rolled up, I put the log on a plate and covered it with plastic wrap before placing it in the freezer to firm up for about 15 minutes. I then put it on a cutting board and cut off the rough edges with a  bread knife. I cut the log into 1/2” slices and placed them on a parchment lined baking sheet and baked them for 10 minutes before turning the sheet around in the oven. After 11 more minutes, I took them out of the oven and let them cool for 10 minutes on the baking sheet before transferring to a cooling rack. I had quite a lot of butter left over, so you probably don’t need as much as the recipe calls for.

Analysis:

The first thing you notice is that these are super crunchy. They are borderline hard, but they give right before you start thinking they might be too hard. The flavor is very nice and sugary, which pairs nicely with the buttery flavors. The cardamom comes through, as well, adding some interest to the pinwheels (not that the incredible texture isn’t interesting enough). I really like the sensation of the sugar melting on my tongue, kinda giving a cooling sensation. Finally, I want to mention the caramelized notes there are that ensure that there’s some variety in sugar flavors, too. Overall, I’ll give this recipe a 10/10. It’s just too easy to make. With how few ingredients there are and how simple they are, it’s kinda impressive how good the final product is. Sometimes simple is just better.