Best Recipe You’ve Never Heard of: Broken Phyllo Cake

Get the recipe for Broken Phyllo Cake With Orange and Bay here: bit.ly/3XreRWR
The best recipe you’ve never heard of is Broken Phyllo Cake. We’d never heard of it either, until we visited chef Marianna Leivaditaki in Crete. It’s her version of portokalopita, a syrup-soaked dessert made from dry, broken-up bits of phyllo dough in place of flour. It tends to be heavy and sodden, but in her book “Aegean,” Leivaditaki tells of a friend’s mother who made the best, lightest portokalopita she’d ever tried. She toasted the phyllo strips first, which gave the cake lift and a layered structure, with almost a sponge cake-like texture.
That’s doused in a simple, citrusy soaking syrup with cinnamon, cardamom, and bay.
As Chris Kimball observes: “if you made this at home, you would be a local hero.”