Pastilla Baking Tray & Layering Technique Tools

The right tray for pastilla

Pastilla is traditionally a shallow disc, wider than it is tall, so the ideal vessel is a round, flat-based tin or oven dish with low sides — a metal cake tin, a shallow round baking dish, or a paella-style pan all serve. The flat base ensures the bottom layers crisp evenly, and the low sides let you fold the overhanging pastry neatly back over the filling to seal the top. A round of roughly twenty-four to twenty-eight centimetres suits a family pastilla; smaller tins make individual ones.

Traditionally pastilla was baked in a metal dish over or beside the embers, and today an ovenproof metal tin conducts heat to the base best for a crisp bottom. Non-stick or a well-buttered surface helps you turn the finished pie out or slide it onto a plate whole. Some cooks assemble and crisp the pie in a wide frying pan on the hob, then finish it in the oven — any shallow, flat, ovenproof round works.

Layering tools and technique

The workhorse tool is a pastry brush, because pastilla is built by brushing each fragile leaf of warqa or filo with melted butter as you lay it, overlapping the sheets around the tin with their edges hanging over the rim. The butter glues the layers, carries flavour, and is what makes the baked pastry shatteringly crisp. Have a bowl of melted butter and a soft brush ready before you start, and work quickly and confidently, because the pastry waits for no one.

Once the base layers line the tin, the filling goes in — often in the classic order of savoury meat, then almonds, then a layer of soft spiced egg — and the overhanging pastry is folded back over the top, with a few more buttered leaves laid on to seal the parcel. Tuck the edges down neatly inside the tin so the pie holds its round shape. A wide palette knife or fish slice helps lift and turn a large pastilla without tearing it.

• Soft pastry brush + melted butter — brush every single leaf.
• Overlap sheets with overhang so you can fold and seal the top.
• Palette knife or fish slice to lift and turn the finished pie intact.

Keeping pastry workable and finishing the pie

The great enemy of pastilla assembly is drying pastry. Warqa, brick and filo all turn brittle and crack within minutes of being exposed to air, so keep the stack you are not using covered with a lightly dampened cloth or cling film and take one sheet at a time. Work in a sensible order — filling prepared and cooled, butter melted, tin ready — so the assembly is quick and the sheets never sit out drying while you hunt for the next thing.

Bake until the pastry is deep golden and crisp all over, then finish the classic way: a dusting of icing sugar over the top, often with fine lines of cinnamon crossed over it in a lattice. A small sieve or shaker gives an even snow of sugar, and a stencil or a steady hand makes the cinnamon lines. For the pastry itself and its substitutes, see our warqa pan guide.