Supermarket search pays off
There’s this dessert I will make for the holiday that is crumbly and delicious and has an ingredient that’s fairly exotic, at least in my kitchen. It’s not hard to make once the ingredients are in the house. But getting one of them can be a challenge.
I came across the recipe while scrolling through some videos. The one thing that I enjoy about social media is the way in which the algorithm pays attention to what you like and then gives you a whole flood of it. For me, it’s cooking and baking videos. If you spend even a few seconds watching one of them, you’re shuttled down some special chute and land in a place where you are fed nothing but cooking and baking videos.
That’s how I was served the recipe for something called the flaky apple cobbler. The video showed a pair of hands wadding sheets of dough, putting them into a baking dish, adding other things including indecent amounts of melted butter, and then baking.
The dough sheets are phyllo, the refrigerated pastry that’s used for layered dishes like spanakopita and baklava. For my dessert, I would crumple each sheet as I would a piece of paper, line them up in the pan, cover with melted butter and apple pie filling, top that with another row of phyllo crumples and melted butter, and then bake. The video made it look simple.
And so off I scampered to the supermarket to fetch the ingredients. I tossed the cans of apple pie filling and the pound of butter into the cart and headed to get the phyllo.
On each visit to the store I see products that are on other shoppers’ weekly lists, but that I’ve never bought – things like turnips, canned wieners, lamb chops or prepared meatballs. Similarly, this would be my maiden voyage on a search for phyllo dough. It would prove to be an odyssey through the backwoods of the store.
I pushed my cart to the obvious place, the refrigerator section where they keep pie dough, chocolate chip cookie dough and canned biscuits. Phyllo is a cold, prepared, doughy thing, and so that’s where it would be. But it was not there. I feared that others had seen the same video and bought it all up, but wouldn’t there be an empty space? There was no sign that the phyllo was ever on that shelf.
I did a three-point turn with the cart and headed for the frozen foods. I passed a young man stocking shelves and thought to ask him for directions, but I wasn’t sure if it’s pronounced “fee-low” or “fye-low,” so I kept going and rolled into a frozen foods aisle and started opening those steamed glass doors.
It was not with the frozen bread, not with the ice cream, not with the breakfast sandwiches or pizzas. Aha! Maybe it would be with the French toast. Nope.
Just as I was about to give up and just do the lazy thing and buy a Sara Lee coffee cake, I saw a long, flat box in the dark, bottom corner behind the last door. Phyllo dough. One remaining box.
I baked the recipe that evening. What emerged from the oven was a pan of what looked like dried autumn leaves. It was flaky and sweet and delicious, and totally worth the search.
You should try it sometime. By the way, it’s pronounced “fee-low,” and you can find it in the freezer aisle, next to the frozen dog food. Go figure.