SIOUX CITY, IOWA (KCAU) – The Gyro Fest Drive Up is this weekend and that means a lot of food needs to be prepared for the droves of Siouxlanders looking for a taste of Greek cuisine. This includes their most popular pastry, Baklava.

“They come for Baklava. They hear Baklava, they’re at the front door,” Church volunteer Mary Sharp said.

Just below the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church is the sweet smell of Baklava. Volunteers have spent all week preparing the popular pastry for this weekend’s Gyro Fest Drive Up.

“15 for the weekend and we have extra in case we run out. There’s 96 pieces per sheet,” Sharp said.

That totals out to 1,440 pieces of sweet, sticky goodness.

“We’ve got butter, lots of butter. We have the Phyllo dough. We have the nuts. We have sugar, cinnamon in the mixture with some breadcrumbs. And then we just start layering. We put a full pound of phyllo on the bottom, and then in the middle part, we start layering the nuts and the phyllo, the nuts, the phyllo, the nuts. And then we put two pounds of phyllo in the center part and then the top part has a full pound,” Sharp explained.

“It takes a day with a lot of people to prepare it, to have it ready, and then we freeze it, and now we take them out and we bake it,” Church volunteer Kiki Karris said.

When the Baklava is finished baking, its then time for the syrup.

“Sugar, water, the lemon rind, orange rind, and cinnamon sticks, cloves, and then at the very end after the boiling finishes up, they put lots of honey,” Sharp said.

Once the syrup and Baklava combine, then it’s time to let it rest. The upcoming drive-thru is just a taste of what’s to come during this summer’s Greek Fest

“Now it was 15 pans of Baklava for this occasion, but for the festival, it would be 50, 60, yeah,” Karris and Sharp said.

And all that hard pays off when they see the faces of folks enjoying their food.

“It makes our work effortless when you see people enjoying what you make,” Karris said.

Now all that’s left to prepare the Baklava for this weekend is to wait until Thursday to cool down and be packaged.

The Gyro Fest Drive Up takes place Saturday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.