Series 6, Episode 6, Flaounes

I didn’t really understand what these were before making them, even after doing a little bit of Googling. Here’s the recipe I used: https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/pauls_flaounas_89782

There were a few challenges with the ingredients here. I couldn’t find the pecorino romano cheese so I used grana padano instead – I don’t know how different they are. There were 2 obscure spices on the list too – mastic powder and ground mahlepi. Since these were a Greek recipe I asked my Greek friend whether she knew where I could find these ingredients. She suggested looking in Turkish shops so I had a visit to one near to where I work. I had no luck here so just decided to go with alternative ingredients – a bit of vanilla and almond essence. I don’t know if these did the trick because I don’t have anything to compare them to!

Step one was to grate the 750g of cheese. I managed about 150g before deciding to use a food processor instead. Once that was completed I mixed the ingredients for the filling together, which looked like this:

It was weird, grainy and mostly cheese.

Making the pastry was more like making a bread – I’m not sure what type of pastry it was supposed to be but it was pretty simple. Here’s the dough:

The sesame seeds to coat the flaounes needed to be boiled in vinegar and then dried – I’m not sure what the purpose of this was.

Once the dough had rested for an hour I then needed to cut out 12 circles. There was exactly the right amount of dough for this, which was quite satisfying. These needed to be pressed into the sesame seeds. I had absolutely loads of sesame seeds leftover, even though they were all well coated – this was less satisfying.

Next was to divide the filling up and wrap them in the dough circles. This was a little bit awkward as they were huge! Here they are ready to go into the oven:

It said to use 3 egg yolks to glaze them but I only used 2 because I didn’t want loads leftover – this was plenty.

Here they are out of the oven:

You can see here how big they are – especially if you compare them to the ones in the Paul Hollywood recipe! I maybe could have put less filling in them but then would have had loads leftover. I planned to eat half of one when it was still warm from the oven, but accidentally had the whole thing. These were delicious on the day I made them. They were cheesy with a little bit of sweetness coming from the sultanas. I wouldn’t have called the outside a pastry though, it was definitely more bread-like. Unfortunately, the next day they were starting to get a bit stale. I shared some with work colleagues who liked them, but they needed a little bit of time warming up and softening in the microwave.

If I were to make these again I think I’d adjust the quantities slightly. All that cheese was expensive and I feel that they were bigger than they needed to be. I think adding a little bacon into the filling would make it slightly better too.

Lily

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