MARKETS : The House That Baklava Built

Sarkis Pastry, Sarkis Pastry Plaza, 1111 S. Glendale Ave., Glendale, (818) 956-6636. Open Monday to Saturday 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., Sunday 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Second location opening in March at 2424 W. Ball Road, Anaheim, (714) 995-6663.

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My teeth sink through a crackling sheaf of filo and crushed walnuts as the rich, sweet flavors of butter and rosewater fuse in my mouth. “That pastry’s called kul-wushkur ; it means ‘taste and give thanks to heaven,’ ” says jovial Vazken Kolanjian, gesturing with a palm lifted toward the ceiling. He’s describing the Near Eastern specialties in his shop, Sarkis Pastry.

His line-up in the elegant, brightly lit cases includes rows of golden, puffy filo pillows, nut clusters in thousand-leaf pastry cups and tiny pancakes enclosing sweetened cream filling. The names (as is often the case with Near Eastern pastries) are poetic analogies such as lady’s bracelets, flower buds or queen’s crowns. The elaborate confections may be rolled, pressed, stuffed or layered. Above all, Kolanjian insists, “they taste traditional.” Pure butter and even imported pistachios are used to get the best results.

The taste of Sarkis’ wares may be traditional but the business is vibrantly up to date. You can call (800) 4SARKIS to have gift orders shipped anywhere in Sarkis’ custom-designed boxes (which boast a spiffy-looking logo). The Kolanjians--Vazken and his brother Sarkis co-own the shop--are justly proud of the new, two-level mini-mall they’ve built to accommodate their burgeoning business. And they’ll be opening a second shop next door to Zankou Chicken in Anaheim fairly soon.

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Almost from the day it opened in 1983 as a tiny hole-in-the-wall bakery across the street, Sarkis had a sizable following. The name was already familiar to Lebanese-Armenian expatriates living in Glendale because the family had owned a Sarkis Pastries in Beirut. Most of them, like the Kolanjian brothers themselves (and about 25 of their relatives), had fled the 1974 civil unrest that divided and nearly ruined the once-cosmopolitan city.

Despite the war, the original Sarkis still thrives in Beirut’s Armenian quarter, Bourg Hamoud. It was there that the brothers learned their trade from their older cousin Garabet, who still keeps up the business. Kolanjian describes him as “our hero.”

After the boys’ father passed away at an early age, Garabet ran the shop. The brothers would go in after school to help out. Afternoons were passed folding boxes and helping with the baking. “As he worked,” says Kolanjian, “our cousin would talk to us about everything--how to speak to the customers, how to display the pastries and how to cook. Almost without realizing it, he taught us just about everything we needed to know.”

The Glendale Sarkis has come a long way from its humble beginnings, when the brothers often napped at the shop in sleeping bags to get all the work done. “We had to do everything,” Kolanjian remembers: “mop the floors, wash the dishes, do the deliveries and turn out beautifully decorated cakes as well.”

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Today Sarkis has eight employees--several of them full-time bakers--and Kolanjian is excited about the possibilities for improvement and expansion--something he says would have been unlikely in Beirut. Over there, he explains, each neighborhood had its own pastry shop and few people drove very far in the old narrow streets, so you were pretty much limited to being a neighborhood business.

And you never had the kind of supplies and services we can get over here. He is wild about UPS and other postal delivery services that have been essential to his mail-order business. He loves the way flour manufacturing companies offer so many choices--”more types than you can imagine.” When he describes the wonders of American packaging material catalogues, you’d think he was shopping for Christmas: “So many kinds of things!” he says.

Something else that generates excitement around the bakery is the amazing variety of specialty bakery equipment available here. Every year at the International Bakers and Equipment Convention, Vazken and Sarkis cruise the aisles hunting for new labor-saving inspirations. Last year they acquired a glaze sprayer to use on the fruit tarts and the pastries they always had to glaze by hand. Sarkis also acquired a doughnut depositor to make their fritter-like fried bamya , which had also been fashioned by hand.

But it’s more than technical wizardry and peripheral supplies that keeps Sarkis growing. In spite of its ethnic origins, the place seems to have an international clientele. Word of the bakery spread when their regular customers began taking boxes of Sarkis pastries to their offices, says Kolanjian. Soon people from the offices would come in--at first for the European-style items, then for baklava or kunafa -based sweets.

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The shop also makes European pastries, as many Near Eastern pastry shops have done since the period betwen the two World Wars, when Syria and Lebanon were under French political authority. Samih Tarhini, a baker who worked at Lebanon’s famous Patisserie La Gondole, also spent some time during the war working in a pastry shop in Paris. He is responsible for Sarkis’ ultra-pistachio layer cakes, the Brazil cakes and the marzipan cake.

Sarkis’ fancy cookies are still piped by hand from a pastry bag. but that will soon change. Next year Sarkis plans to get a new Italian cookie dough-shaping machine that Kolanjian discovered at the International Bakers and Equipment Convention. “You have to keep abreast of things,” he says intently.

Shopping List

The Near Eastern pastries at Sarkis are basically Lebanese-Syrian in style, though there are naturally close ties with the pastries of Armenia, Turkey and Greece. Each country--sometimes each town--in the Near East has its own twist on any given pastry, and often a different name for it as well. The rich clotted cream known as ashta (or qishta ) in Arabic is known as kaymak in Turkey and in some Arab countries. Kunafa is known as katayif in Turkey and kadaifi in Greece. Although Sarkis’ owners are Armenian, they call Near Eastern pastries by their Arabic names, as they did back in Lebanon.

POPULAR AND HOME- STYLE SWEETS

The daintily shaped baklava and kunafa pastries are the royalty of Near Eastern sweets--indeed, they were perfected in palace kitchens--but there are also treats for the pastry-lover-in-the-street.

In Lebanon, Kolanjian says, old retired bakers make these everyday sweets at home and go around the neighborhood selling their wares from carts. It was the way many of them kept body and soul together. Knowing this, everyone in the neighborhood would patronize the carts even if the vendor charged a little more than shops and bakeries.

* Bamya: These puffy fried nuggets of dough drenched in heavy syrup got their Persian name (“okra”) because that’s what they look like. Their pointed shape and ridges originally came from the technique of forming them--holding the bamya dough in one hand and squeezing out small portions, which would be lopped off with a spoon into hot cooking oil. When done they are sweetened with syrup, like most Near Eastern pastries. Persians flavor syrup for bamya with rosewater, but Lebanese cooks usually do not. In Turkey these sweet fritters go by the name lokma .

Sarkis’ updated bamya lack the traditional ridges. “We use a doughnut depositor to extract the dough into the oil,” says Kolanjian. “We sent one to our cousin in Lebanon and he loves it.”

* Zulubia: Yeast-leavened batter, fancifully swirled into hot oil from a funnel, turns into a lacy, roughly disk-shaped pastry of a crisp, puffy texture. After being dipped in heavy syrup, it becomes translucent, and when the syrup is colored red or yellow, the fritters take on the sheer look of hard candy. This is an extremely ancient pastry, so old that food historians don’t know whether it was Persian or Arab to begin with, or even whether the name was originally zulubia , zalibia or zulabia . They show up in this passage from “The Arabian Nights”: “Of sweet zulabiya chain I hung a necklace around her neck.” Persians took them to India, and you may have seen them in Indian sweet shops, where they are called jilebi .

* Mushabbek: Like churros --those long, fluted, cruller-like Spanish fritters --mushabbek are piped in a thick, pretzel-like swirl into sizzling oil. Their yeast-leavened dough is made with farina and, like zulubia , they are dipped in thick sugar syrup when done. The resulting pastry is dense and very sweet, though not quite as cavity-jarring as zulubia.

* Macaron: Similar to mushabbek, but made with semolina, macaron are also deep-fried and dipped in heavy syrup. They’re shaped into long, thick wavy ovals that are best eaten slightly warm.

ASSORTED SPECIALTIES

* Ataif: Kolanjian says these small, stuffed pancakes come from a very ancient recipe. Ancient indeed. It turns out, in fact, that ataif (then pronounced qataif ) were a favorite snack in 10th Century Baghdad. In some regions of the Near East, stuffed ataif are handed out to well-wishers at colorful wedding processions while the bride and her wedding gifts are transported to the house of the bridegroom.

What makes them a little different from American pancakes is that they are cooked twice--once on one side only, leaving the other side a little tacky, so it can be folded over a filling and sealed. Sarkis stuffs ataif with walnut or ashta filling and then deep-fries them and dips them in rosewater-flavored syrup. On weekends Sarkis makes raw ataif. For this pastry, the pancakes are folded over a little ashta. Their garnishes--a spritz of chopped pistachios and a dab of red pastry gel--give them the look of a flower.

* Saraya: Aish el-saraya means “bread of the palace” in Arabic, but as “breads” go, these syrup-drenched cake fingers, smothered in creamy ashta and completely coated in minced pistachios, are the sort that Marie-Antoinette would have ordered. Amazingly, the rich, cake-like pastry actually is bread; you wouldn’t guess, because of the rich syrup.

* Barazi: “Every traveler who visits Damascus must return with barazi for friends and relatives,” proclaims Kolanjian. “That’s essential.” If you don’t get to Damascus that often, Sarkis will supply you with these large, flat, crumbly butter-and-semolina cookies, completely blanketed with sesame seeds. Unlike many Arab pastries, they are not excessively sweet.

* Maamoul: Bakers and home cooks both use carved wooden molds to give these stuffed cookies an imprinted design. In Sarkis’ case, the date-filled version is customized with the word SARKIS emblazoned across the top of the cookie. Nut-filled maamoul are fashioned in the classical dome shape so that they have a healthy portion of nut filling tucked into the farina-and-butter cookie exterior. Maamoul is an Easter specialty.

* Date-Filled Basma: Date basma has a sandwich-like form like the kunafa -based nut-filled basma , but the likeness ends there. The pastry for these basma is the same farina-based butter cookie dough used for stuffed maamoul cookies, and the filling is an unsweetened puree of dates. They’re a little like Fig Newtons, and their subtle sweetness makes them a perfect accompaniment to tea or coffee.

* Namura: This belongs to the family of helva sweets, which are basically cooked or baked puddings made with various starches. It is made from semolina, slightly leavened with yeast, and looks like a square of cornbread (with much the same texture). In contrast to the intricate, sometimes flashy baklava and kunafa sweets, namura is plain and homey, but still thoroughly delicious.

* Basbusa: This member of the helva family is popular in Egypt. Like namoura , its thick, yeast-leavened batter is baked, producing a dense cake. The baked basbusa is cut into small rectangles, each of which is topped with two pistachios and sweetened with syrup.

BAKLAVA PASTRIES

Baklava is one of the very few pastries that has ever had its own annual parade. (We bet you never knew that.) Beginning in the 16th Century, in the days of Suleyman the Magnificent, it became customary for the Janissaries (an elite corps of soldiers) stationed in Istanbul to march to the Topkapi Palace on the 15th day of Ramadan. They’d enter the Second Courtyard, where the royal kitchens were located, and each troop would receive two trays of baklava, which they’d sling from a pole and carry back to their barracks in a boisterous parade known as the Baklava Procession.

Baklava is still a food of celebration. Usually the pastries are reserved for social calls at home or in cafes and for special holidays (which means they are eaten just about all the time anyway). Baklavas aren’t customarily served for dessert; fruit is usually offered after meals.

Baklava-making is considered an artistic skill, and with all the fancifully shaped varieties you can almost imagine the palace cooks sitting around trying to think up new and ever more exotic things to do by combining filo dough, nuts and flavored syrup--their basic components.

Filo (sometimes spelled phyllo), the multilayered paper-thin dough sheets, can create a crisp airy pastry. Some home recipes call for spreading out the filo sheets separately, brushing them with butter and stacking them. But professional Lebanese bakers roll out many sheets of the dough at once, using cornstarch to keep the layers apart. Only after the pastries are formed are they drizzled with sweet butter and baked. At Sarkis, the pastries are sweetened with a very light sugar syrup flavored slightly with rosewater.

* Diamond Baklava: Probably because it is a fixture on Greek menus, diamond-shaped baklava is the one best known in the West. Unfortunately it is often stored too long and becomes soggy. People who don’t think they like baklava usually change their minds when they try it freshly made. Sarkis’ version is wonderfully crisp and abundantly filled with minced walnuts.

* Wardeh: A filling of chopped cashews is centered on a small square stack of filo and the pastry is pulled up around it to form a flower or rose--the pastry’s name in Arabic. Minced pistachios are strewn like pollen over the top. Wardeh is sometimes called queen’s baklava because the shape, with its upward-rising points, resembles a crown with jewels.

Another style of wardeh has a completely different character, for although it has the same flower shape, the filling is a cluster of whole, dark-roasted pistachios that lend an aromatic toasted flavor to the pastry.

* Kul-Wushkur: Presumably when you bite into this pastry you are blessed to have had such heavenly flavor pass your lips. Kul-wushkur is simply a small rectangle of baklava leaves folded over a crushed walnut filling like a puffy envelope.

* Swair El-Sitt: Some call this “ladies’ bangle,” others “bird’s nest.” The small, dainty baklava is a hollow tube of pastry leaves formed into a circle that’s said to resemble a bracelet. The pastry circle is garnished in the center with a dimple of minced pistachio nuts.

* Finger Baklavas: Also known as bride’s fingers, the filo for this baklava is rolled around a small log of minced walnuts and garnished with a mist of ground pistachios. A larger, rectangular-shaped finger baklava is similar but uses almonds as a filling--”a more modern version,” Kolanjian says.

* Shabiet: Shabiet is simply a small sheaf of filo layers folded into a triangle over velvety, almost cheese-like ashta .

There are walnut-filled shabiet too. In Lebanon, these less complicated and theoretically less fancy pastries are eaten as everyday snacks.

KUNAFA (KATAIF) PASTRIES

Kunafa dough is as fundamental to Near Eastern pastry as filo. The technique is at least 1,000 years old, and it’s fascinating to watch the bakers make these fine filaments of dough, which some compare rather mundanely to shredded wheat.

At Sarkis, the process is semi-automated. The batter for kunafa (which resembles thin pancake batter) goes into a large triangular vessel with holes at the narrow end, into which a perforated rod is inserted. When the rod is turned, it opens the holes, and fine streams of batter flow out onto a copper griddle rotating over a gas flame. As soon as the dough sets, the still-raw kunafa filaments are whisked off, like so much straw, and piled onto a cooling tray.

Pastry cooks have dreamed up as many ways to use kunafa dough as filo. Each of the pastries made with it has its own peculiar texture.

* Kunafa (Kataif) Rolls: For baked kunafa (also called kataif at Sarkis), handfuls of the thread-like dough are lightly molded around a small cylinder of minced, slightly sweetened walnuts. The resulting rolls, which are about the size of a thumb, are drenched with butter and baked. They emerge golden brown, crunchy and slightly airy. They’re set on a rack and generously sweetened with syrup.

* Osmalie: This is much like kunafa , except for being filled with creamy ashta instead of nuts. Sarkis sells this specialty only on weekends.

* Balluriyeh: In contrast to the wispy-textured, golden-colored kunafa rolls, balluriyeh are dense, cookie-like squares that remain snowy-white. A filling of very coarsely chopped pistachios is sandwiched between two buttery, tightly compressed layers of kunafa . Before being cut into squares, balluriyeh is formed in sheets on a tray. Each filled sheet is cooked on one side over a very low gas flame, then flipped to cook the other side--a technique that leaves the pastry absolutely white (the name means “glassy”).

* Burma: For this, a log of glazed whole pistachios is covered with kunafa dough and then sliced into kaleidoscope-like disks. The bakers spread out the kunafa and roll it around the nuts, giving the pastry its name (“rolled”). Burma is deep-fried in sweet butter and then dipped into a light syrup. The result is a thin border of golden buttery pastry surrounding the filling.

* Basma: Basma takes the idea of crispness a step further. The bakers make the crust of this layered pastry by crumbling up kunafa with butter and sugar, then baking it to a golden brown. This process is repeated three times to assure that every shred of the kunafa is completely crunchy--almost like a praline. The crumbly, fragile pastry is filled with sweetened, chopped pistachios, cooked like balluriyeh , one side at a time, and finally cut into dainty squares.