My favorite pastry

[bobquasit]

It's called Bahadj (or Pahadj, or Khoritzov Baghach), and my grandmother used to make it. It basically means "bread", but it's not just bread. It's a yeast pastry, not sweet, that is incredibly buttery. The filling is fried flour and butter - just those two ingredients, crumbled together and fried until they turn orange (!).

The dough is rolled out and painted with melted butter. Then it is folded over, and rolled out again, and painted with melted butter again and folded over again, and rolled out again, etc etc etc etc. Probably at least a dozen times, and possibly many more than that.

It takes a lot of work to make.

The result is flaky and dense and incredibly buttery and the filling literally melts in your mouth. The taste is a bit like a croissant dialed up to eleven, but the texture is quite different. I love it.

Unfortunately it's impossible to find my grandmother's recipe, because it was never written down. It was unique to her village in the old country, as far as I know. Other villages had their own versions, many of them sweet, but none of them like the one she made. I wish we had worked with her to write down a recipe for it while she was still alive.

My mother did find a recipe for it in a book written by a relative, but it's not as good. Mom has tried tweaking it to get it closer to what her mother made, and she has definitely made it better; it's really good. My son and I both love it, although she only makes it about once a year. But it's not quite as amazing as the ones my grandmother made.

I've never done any baking with yeast, and I have to admit that the recipe intimidates me. But one of these days I'm going to get my nerve up and try to make it with my son. And we'll do our best to make it as close to what my grandmother made as possible.