Filo dough

More and more culinary experts today are interested in new, still untried products that arouse considerable curiosity among the inexperienced lover of gastronomy. One such unusual product is filo dough, although it is surely familiar to more experienced chefs who never tire of experimenting with this rather unconventional type of flour semi-finished product for many.

Meanwhile, filo pastry or otherwise phyllo is a fresh, drawn pastry that is unusually subtle. Interestingly, in Greek, the word Phyllon can be translated as Leaf, so filo dough layers are thin as sheets of paper - their thickness can hardly be thicker than a few millimeters, and ideally even smaller.

Most often, filo dough is used in Mediterranean, Greek and Turkish cuisines, where numerous dishes are prepared from it, in particular sweet pastries. For example, Turkish cuisine is also quite characteristic of baking from such dough - there it is called borek or boregi, in Albania it is called byrek, and as for Austrian-German-Hungarian cooking, there filo dough is called blatterteig and a strudel oven is accepted from it.

Notably, filo dough sheets, whose thickness does not exceed a paper sheet, have a significantly lower fat content than all other varieties of dough. This product can be purchased both frozen and chilled (which is much less common).

The size of filo dough sheets directly depends on the manufacturer, but when preparing most dishes, you can easily cut or twist it to the required size of your baking dish. When you decide to make something with this dough, remember that once thawed, each layer of filo needs to be smeared with olive or melted butter for a crisp result.

If you have enough desire and patience or just really want to tinker in the kitchen, you can undoubtedly make homemade filo dough using one of the many recipes that are abundant on almost all culinary sites. The main secret of making filo dough is to carefully, in the right direction and roll it out very thinly. By the way, it is recommended to roll it exclusively on corn starch, since wheat flour is not suitable for these purposes.

Puff dough, which is very similar to filo dough, differs in many ways from this product, although in some recipes for cooking products they often replace each other. Their main difference is the composition of these types of dough: for example, when making filo, more flour and less fat are used compared to puff dough, so the finished one is more fragile and crisp.