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Making Traditional K'nafeh

Baking and Finishing K'nafeh

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Amy Riolo
Author, Cooking Instructor, Food Writer, Culinary Consultant
http://www.amyriolo.com/  
 

Amy Riolo is an internationally recognized culinary expert specializing in Middle Eastern and Mediterranean culture and cuisine. As a cookbook author, lecturer, food historian, food writer, culinary consultant, and cooking instructor, Amy promotes her philosophy of cooking and living with both pleasure and health. Her first book, Arabian Delights; Recipes & Princely Entertaining Ideas from the Arabian Peninsula has received rave reviews (Capital Books). Her second book Nile Style; Egyptian Cuisine and Culture (Hippocrene Books) will be released in spring 2009. She is also completing The Mediterranean Diabetes Cookbook, (American Diabetes Association) which will be released in spring 2010.

Amy’s popular lectures range in topics and include everything from Middle Eastern business etiquette to the history of various cuisines. She has been an invited guest speaker for the Embassy of the Arab Republic of Egypt, Welcome to Washington International, Montgomery College, Les Dames D’Escoffier, The Baltimore-Luxor-Alexandria Sister City Committee and the Mycological Association of Washington, DC. Amy also makes frequent appearances on numerous television and radio programs both in the United States and Egypt including Fox TV, Montgomery and Fairfax County TV, Nile TV and WHYY.           

Amy currently writes the “Culture and Cuisine” feature for the Baltimore- Luxor-Alexandria Sister City Committee. She has also written articles for Cooking Light Magazine, Azizah Magazine, and the Kulanu newsletter. A graduate of Cornell University, Amy has experience in vocational, recreational, and children’s instruction, as well as corporate team building and cultural/culinary events. Her knowledge of the Italian, French, Spanish, and Arabic languages has enabled her to interpret many cultures and cuisines with intimacy and ease. She regularly teaches cooking classes at Sur la Table in Arlington, Virginia, and for private organizations.

A successful culinary consultant, Amy enjoys developing menus, recipes, training seminars, and themes for corporations, restaurants, and hotels. Amy is often asked to work as a consultant for museums where she creates menus and décor which represent the theme of new collections. In addition, she works with curators to incorporate sensory components like scent, touch, and taste into the schedule of events, allowing museum patrons to fully experience each exhibit.

Amy is a member of The International Association of Culinary Professionals, Culinary Historians of Washington, Les Dames d’Escoffier, Slow Food DC, Welcome to Washington International (where she co-chairs the Gourmet Committee), Cornell Club of Washington, the Women’s National Book Association, and the Baltimore – Luxor – Alexandria Sister City Committee (Where she is the chairperson of the Baltimore Friends of the Alexandria Library). Amy is based in the Washington DC, area and maintains a home in Egypt. She is currently organizing culinary tours to both the Mediterranean and Middle East.

Baking and Finishing K'nafeh

 

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Pistachios

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K'nafeh

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Baking and Finishing K'nafeh

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups sugar

Two large strips of orange peel

Juice of one small orange

2 cups of shelled unsalted pistachios

2 tablespoons of sugar

1 teaspoon of orange blossom water

4 sticks of unsalted butter

1 pound package of Kataifi, which has been thawed at room temperature for two hours

1 cup of water

Instructions

1. Add the sugar, orange juice, orange peel and water to a pot at medium heat. Stir and bring mixture to a boil and allow it to cook for a minute. Once the sugar has dissolved, allow it to simmer on low heat for 10-15 minutes.

 

2. Put the butter into a pan and cook on medium heat to melt. Skim the white milk solids off the top. Transfer the butter into a big bowl.

 

3. Place the Kataifi over the top of the bowl and break it up into little pieces and immerse it in the butter.

 

4. Put the pistachios into a food processor and add sugar and orange blossom water. Pulse until you get evenly ground pistachios.

 

5. Place half the K'nafeh in the bottom of a 9X13 pan and half will go on top. Layer the K'nafeh to cover the bottom of the pan.

 

6. Pour the pistachio filling in and place the other half of the K'nafeh on top. Press it down with your hands to make it even.

 

7. Cover the pan with tin foil and place a five pound weight on top. Put it in the refrigerator for an hour or overnight.

 

8. Take a knife and cut squares only about 3/4 of the way down. Bake it for abour an hour to an hour and 10 minutes at 350 degrees.

 

9. Pour the syrup on top and finish cutting the K'nafeh and plate and serve it.

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Transcripts

Amy Riolo: Hi! I am Amy Riolo. Today we are making Pistachio K'nafeh. We have just we have just finished assembling our K'nafeh, and I am going to show you how to weight the K'nafeh and refrigerate it, so that you can cut it bake it.

All that we need to do is we have to take our finished K'nafeh and then we cover it with tin foil and we press the tin foil actually down right onto the top of the surface. You want to make sure that all of it is covered and that it's nice and even and flat, and then we take five pound weight and this can be any kind of weight you would like. It can be a bag of sugar, a bag of flour or regular weights, because we are working here today in the kitchen we have got pie weight, so I am going to actually put that bag of pie weights right on to the top. You can also use rice or beans, if you have them, and we are just going to transfer this to the refrigerator.

You can do this to up to an hour or overnight, and the reason that we do this is because it really helps the K'nafeh, the strains to melt and to get more compressed into the filling. That way when we pour the syrup over, it grabs onto everything and it tastes really well. If we were to do it without doing that, the Kataifi would be lighter less dense or a little bit more difficult to eat. So we are going to transfer to refrigerator and we are going to leave it there for one hour or as early as overnight and then we will come back we will bake the K'nafeh.

So it has been over an hour and now we can remove the weights from our K'nafeh and cut it. So I am just going to take this weight off and set them aside and take off our tin foil and you can see that the K'nafeh is kind of pressed down. It's much more compressed than it was before, and then we are just going to take a knife and we are going to even sized square. You can use whatever size you like, but I would like to make ones that are a little bit less than an inch.

So I am going to make about seven lines across the top of our Pan here and we are cutting down. We are only going about three quarters of the way down. You don't want to go all the way down because if you do when you pour this syrup over the top it will just go right to the bottom and you won't get any of this syrup on the top of the K'nafeh and we will have an even consistency. So cut down about three quarters of the way and you can just patch if you get any little broken pieces as you go through. But you can see, if you want to do this in muffins or in mini muffin tins, you can have very easy little circular shapes or you can make the little nests as we talked about earlier.

One of things that's very traditional in the Middle East -- I am going to make about five cuts going down this way -- but one of things that's very traditional in the Middle East is to make the Kataifi into little nest which looks like bird's nest and then fill them with the sweet cheese, which is like a sweet version of mozzarella kind of a cheese, and then they put little pine nuts on top and bake them. So it's looks like a little bird's nest and the pine nest look just like bird's egg. This is very cute and it's a very common sweet that is eaten.

So we are just done, we have about 35 pieces now. We are going to put our extra here into the pan and what we can do now is bake this. This bakes for about an hour, maybe an hour and ten minutes, and we put it into our preheated oven, which is preheated to 350 degrees. So now our K'nafeh has its baking for about an hour and ten minutes; it's nice and golden brown, and we are going to go the oven and remove it.

Sometimes I like to turn the K'nafeh during baking. If we rotate the pan during baking, it gets a nice even golden consistency, and this is what it looks like, when it's golden and when it's ready to serve. I am just going to cover it with some sweet syrup which we made earlier and because it's nice and hot and the syrup is cool. This is really going to grab onto the K'nafeh and make a nice delicious sweet dish. So this is why it's important not to cut down all of the way.

you can pour it on but I'd like to label it on, because I think you can see what you are doing better and get a little bit more control, and then you just let this cool all the way to room temperature and then you can finish cutting it very carefully and then serve it. And there you have you Pistachio K'nafeh. Enjoy!

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