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Unspellable But Delicious
A while ago I wrote an entry about Watertown, MA and an Armenian dish called lahmejun.
I also mentioned choreg, which is a sweet small bread flavored with cardamom.
But there's one Armenian pastry that you won't find in any Watertown market: it's called paghach, or katah, although it's pronounced as if it begins with a "b" or "g" respectively. It's a regional or village sort of bread, and there are probably as many different recipes for it as there are villages in the Near and Middle East.
But basically it's a bread dough that has been rolled out flat, painted with melted butter and then folded and rolled out again. The rolled-out dough is then painted with melted butter and then folded and rolled out again. This process is repeated about 500 times (well, a LOT of times, anyway). The final dough is made into a flat rectangular shape, which when baked is about one to two inches thick.
Sometimes a filling is put inside before baking which consists of flour and butter which have been mixed together and fried in a pan until they turn orange and crumbly - which sounds gross, but tastes incredibly good. It literally melts in your mouth. I guess it's spelled kortiz, but it's pronounced as if it begins with a gutteral rolled "h", so that my attempt to spell it phonetically would be more like "horits", rhyming with "more bits".
The resulting bread is as buttery as the best croissant, and in fact the flavor is very similar, but the bread is much denser and the flavor is more intense. Unfortunately no one sells it; the only way I have to get it is to persuade my parents to make it for me. I have their recipe, but in order to learn it properly I'll have to have a day free to go up and cook a batch with them.
If you'd like to find more Armenian recipes, http://www.cilicia.com/armo_cookbook.html is a good place to start.
I also mentioned choreg, which is a sweet small bread flavored with cardamom.
But there's one Armenian pastry that you won't find in any Watertown market: it's called paghach, or katah, although it's pronounced as if it begins with a "b" or "g" respectively. It's a regional or village sort of bread, and there are probably as many different recipes for it as there are villages in the Near and Middle East.
But basically it's a bread dough that has been rolled out flat, painted with melted butter and then folded and rolled out again. The rolled-out dough is then painted with melted butter and then folded and rolled out again. This process is repeated about 500 times (well, a LOT of times, anyway). The final dough is made into a flat rectangular shape, which when baked is about one to two inches thick.
Sometimes a filling is put inside before baking which consists of flour and butter which have been mixed together and fried in a pan until they turn orange and crumbly - which sounds gross, but tastes incredibly good. It literally melts in your mouth. I guess it's spelled kortiz, but it's pronounced as if it begins with a gutteral rolled "h", so that my attempt to spell it phonetically would be more like "horits", rhyming with "more bits".
The resulting bread is as buttery as the best croissant, and in fact the flavor is very similar, but the bread is much denser and the flavor is more intense. Unfortunately no one sells it; the only way I have to get it is to persuade my parents to make it for me. I have their recipe, but in order to learn it properly I'll have to have a day free to go up and cook a batch with them.
If you'd like to find more Armenian recipes, http://www.cilicia.com/armo_cookbook.html is a good place to start.