Name: Şerifoğlu Café & Patisserie
Address: Slotermeerlaan 115, Amsterdam, 1063 JN, NL
Telephone: 020 611 0328
Price range: €€
Rating: 3.6

Netherlands

Amsterdam

Şerifoğlu Café & Patisserie

Forty paper-thin sheets of dough, brushed with clarified butter, layered around a bed of ground pistachios or walnuts, cut into diamonds or squares, baked until gold and then flooded with hot syrup: baklava is the pastry the Ottoman kitchens perfected and the whole former empire still argues over. Gaziantep, in south-eastern Türkiye, has the strongest claim to the modern version; its pistachio baklava was registered as a protected geographical indication by the EU in 2013, the first Turkish product to get one. Greece makes it with walnuts, honey and cinnamon; the Levant with pistachios or cashews and orange-blossom syrup; the Balkans with walnuts and a heavier hand with syrup. Within Türkiye the family includes şöbiyet with cream, havuç dilimi cut in carrot-shaped wedges, and dürüm rolled rather than layered.

Everything starts with the yufka. A dough of flour, egg, water and a little oil is rolled with a long thin oklava until it is translucent, a skill measured by whether newsprint can be read through it; a tray may hold forty layers, half below the filling and half above. Each sheet is brushed with sade yağ, clarified sheep's-milk or cow's-milk butter, which is what gives the baked pastry its colour and crispness and why margarine versions taste flat. The filling in Antep is pistachio from the region, ground fine but not to paste, sometimes with a layer of kaymak-like cream. The tray is cut before baking, baked at a moderate heat for forty-five minutes or so, and the syrup, sugar and water with lemon, boiled to a light thread, is poured over hot pastry so it is absorbed rather than pooled. A day's rest lets the layers settle.

Turn a piece on its side before you taste it: the layers should be visible, distinct and many, crisp on top and tender below, with the syrup soaked through but no liquid standing on the plate. It should shatter slightly, not bend. The nuts should be fresh and the dominant flavour, bright green in a pistachio baklava, with the butter close behind and the syrup last; a piece that tastes mainly of sugar has been drowned. Mark down soft, soggy layers, a greasy film, a stale or rancid nut note, honey or spices in a Turkish-style baklava, margarine, and portions so sweet that one piece is enough. Serve plain or with kaymak, never with cream or ice cream. A good Antep baklava is eaten in two bites and followed by a second piece, which is the real test.

Baklava

Tres leches cake is a Latin American sponge soaked after baking in a mixture of three milks, evaporated, sweetened condensed and whole milk or cream, until it is saturated and cold, then topped with whipped cream or meringue and often a few strawberries or a dusting of cinnamon. Mexico and Nicaragua both claim it and neither can prove it; the dish spread across the region in the mid-twentieth century along with canned milk, and recipes printed on the labels of evaporated and condensed milk tins did much of the work. It belongs to the same family as the trifle and the European milk-soaked cakes, but the three-milk soak and the fact that the cake is served chilled are its own. It is the standard birthday and celebration cake across Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, sold by the slice in bakeries and by the whole tray for parties.

The sponge has to be built to take liquid without collapsing: a génoise-style cake of whisked eggs, sugar and flour with little or no butter, baked in a shallow rectangular tin, cooled, and pricked all over with a fork or skewer. The milk mixture is roughly equal parts of the three, sometimes with a spoon of rum or vanilla, poured slowly over the cake in stages so that it absorbs rather than pools; a 23 by 33 centimetre cake takes around 600 to 700 millilitres. It then rests in the fridge for at least four hours and better overnight, which is when the cake stops being wet and becomes uniformly moist. The topping goes on cold: lightly sweetened whipped cream in Mexico and the north, an Italian or Swiss meringue in Nicaragua and much of Central America, where the cake is also sometimes finished with a layer of dulce de leche.

Cut a slice and press it: it should be heavy, cold and moist right through, with a little milk weeping onto the plate but no pool, and the crumb should hold together instead of dissolving into pudding. The top should be lighter than the cake, and the sweetness, which is considerable, should come with the dairy richness of the evaporated milk rather than just sugar. Mark down a dry band in the centre where the soak did not reach, a cake so wet it falls apart on the fork, a sponge that has gone gummy from too much flour or butter, canned whipped topping instead of cream, and a serving at room temperature, which turns the whole thing cloying. Cinnamon and fruit are decoration; the cake itself should be judged without them.

Tres Leches Cake

A classic baklava with pistachios. Pretty nice. Crunchy and full of pistachios.

For me it has some sugar that annoys you after second bite. It needs more butter.

There are better places in Turkey but for the Netherlands this is acceptable.

This is simple yet still a quite good dessert for me. There are multiple versions of it. 

At this day I ate the ones with pistachios. The cake was normal and nothing special. Pistachios were fresh.

I recommend it if you want something niced not too sugary. The cream next to it was necessary at all.

Şerifoğlu Café & Patisserie

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