Pasty with Tahini – Tahınlı

The dough is with flour, salt, water and very little yeast. For the filling they use the best Tahini from the region. They brush the pasty just before baking with Tahini again to get a nice golden crust. And here is the row of photos: The process starts with the dough. In one pack of flour 50 kg they put 1 pack of fresh yeast 500 g. The  dough should be soft and firm like an earlobe that’s what the  chef said Let the dough rest until it is double its size.
Then Aydın Usta hauls up the dough in an acrobatic manner and it flies directly onto the working place. Amazing! There the chef portions the dough by eye, but his colleague measures exact 400 g pieces. Another colleague rolls the dough portions into nice rounds. A wooden tray  is layered with cotton cloths and dusted with flour. They place the dough rounds on it. The last in row folds the cloth so gently to avoid that the dough balls are touching each other. Then it is again resting time, until the dough balls rise in size. We go upstairs to the baking room.
Aydın Usta is stirring the Tahini in a large bucket. He said, that it was important to stir the sesame oil well  to get a really creamy Tahini for baking this pasty. He said that the sesame oil in the Tahini was entirely sufficient to achieve a fluffy pasty. Aydın Usta greased the working place with very little sunflower oil. While he was talking to me,  he had already taken a ball of dough and pressed it with his palms and fingers on the marble top and  pulled the dough apart like a strudel. Suddenly he spread Tahini evenly over the dough. I was surprised to see that so soon. But then I realised the reason Ha-ha caught, I saw his trick He used the Tahini to get the dough even larger. He folded the edges onto the surface spread with Tahini and took the edges immediately apart again and “Tar-ra” the dough had become an enormous piece larger and thinner. He did this with all edges in an incredible speed.
Once the dough was big enough, he rolled the dough starting at the bottom with his fingers, just like a strudel without kitchen towels. Then he put the  resulting long roll back down to rest on a floured tray.

Later he took the dough rolls and rolled it between his hands and on the working surface thinly and laid them into snail shaped circles. Which he placed in greased baking pans and let them rest again.
Finally  the chef had to handle the dough one last time. He pressed the snail shaped dough into the baking pan until it was filled. His staff was joking that his hands have adapted the baking dish size. The pasty was now spread with tahini-yolk mixture and set aside again, to rise one last time. For this step, the two youngest members are responsible. The little one climbed up onto  the top of the stone oven, the big one handed him up the baking trays with the pasty. It was warm up there from the oven and the pasty risen nicely.

The oven master Ömer Abi was responsible for baking and the heat in the stone oven. When I asked him how he knew that it was warm enough, he slipped his hand into the oven and said, now there are 200 º C Then he added with a smile, that the stones turn white at 200-210 ° C. Now I know, why the red stones in the oven were suddenly so white. It was not flour then the oven master pushed the baking pans into the oven.
After that, everything took place to quickly. Normally the pasty should bake 10 to 15 minutes, but somehow it seems to me much faster. They are golden brown in no time and the two men have to hurry up, to take out the baking pans and to layer the warm pasties onto the trays to cool.