Matthew Woolen is a master pastry chef and has worked in a variety of Seattle restaurants, including gastropub Old Sage, Zhu Dang, and a gluten-free restaurant called Capitol Cider.

Matthew Woolen

There isn’t much that goes into baklava. In fact, the best baklava filling is made with just pistachios and salt. And yet with just a short list of ingredients, you can make one of the most delicious pastries in the world: crisp layers of phyllo dough soaked in sugar syrup surrounding a filling of pure pistachio. Since there’s so little to it, using the best ingredients is the best way to make great baklava. If you skip the frozen, store-bought phyllo sheets and whip up some <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/phyllo-dough">fresh phyllo from scratch</a>, you’re already almost halfway to better baklava than you can find almost anywhere. Pick up some primo pistachios—the greener the better—for the ultimate baklava experience. The keys to great baklava are preparing the phyllo properly, so it bakes up in distinct, crisp layers, and getting the syrup right. You want a syrup that will resist crystallization, even when cool, and you want to soak the crisp phyllo layers with the syrup, without sogging them out. Our tests found that getting the syrup to [f 225] produced the right fluidity, and the addition of lemon juice both adds a touch of acidity and helps the syrup resist crystallization. Cooling the syrup to [f 90] before pouring it all over the ripping hot pastry straight out of the oven maximizes syrup absorption. As long as you don’t cover the pan, the pastry will stay nice and crisp.

Baklava