ottawa foodies

We served this along with our Christmas cookies. $1.25 per piece. It was well received. :-)

[EDIT: No, we didn't charge our guests $1.25 per piece. That's the price at the store. :P]

We just did a taste test on various Baklava from Middle East Bakery and Malak Pastry. The panel of judges consisted of my wife and her sister, who have spent many years living in the middle east, and me, who is without any qualification other than being a huge lover of Baklava. Our findings:

Middle East Bakery
* Available only with walnuts (topped with a green dusting of pistachio powder).
* Delightfully crispy upper phyllo layer had a nice toasted flavour and shattered wonderfully upon biting into it.
* Honey syrup was perfectly sweet, with a nice natural taste.
* Perfect buttery flavour.

Malak Pastry
* Nice and dense, well-soaked.
* Syrup was nice at first, but quickly seemed too cloying -- more like glucose than honey.
* More chewy than flaky, but still delicious.

Having thoroughly enjoyed the Malak Pastry product before, and being a huge fan of the well-soaked Baklava found in Greek restaurants, I was surprised to find that I really preferred the Middle East Bakery product. It tastes of high quality ingredients and great skill. If you love Baklava, you owe it to yourself to try this one!

Prob due to price!
I go to a local baklava store and you can easily pay $1-2 per piece depending on size and if you want extra nuts on top.

A container like that can easily be $15.00 plus tax!

Al-Kalaa's baklava comes from a bakery in Montreal. Good ... but with all the bakeries in town, I wonder why they get their's from Montreal.

I'll second that one, Malak has a huge variety of Lebanese style baklawa, all of them were tasty that I had! The employee working there offered up samples to me to help me make my selections... very friendly, and very helpful!

Great baklawa.

Their selection of baklava is vast and of excellent quality.

It was a bit dry, but oh so tasty.

This is the best baklava I've ever had! It's sweet but not too sweet. The honey made the dessert nice and moist. And it went super well with the Turkish tea. Simply delicious!

Same giant piece of decadence as it used to be, served with knife and fork!