Filo or phyllo is a very thin unleaveneddough used for making pastries such as baklava and börek in Middle Eastern and Balkan cuisines. Filo-based pastries are made by layering many sheets of filo brushed with oil or butter; the pastry is then baked.
History
The origin of the current practice of stretching raw dough into paper-thin sheets is highly debated, unclear and unknown. Many credit the origins of Filo as far back as antiquity. Ancient Greeks would bake thin breads sweetened with walnuts and honey, arguably the ancestor to baklava. The first documented such food may have been written in Homer's Odyssey written around 800 B.C. In the fifth century B.C. Philoxenos states in his poem "Dinner" that, in the final drinking course of a meal, hosts would prepare and serve cheesecake made with milk and honey that was baked into a pie. The 11th centuryDīwān Lughāt al-Turk by Mahmud Kashgari records the meaning of yurgha, an archaic term for yufka, as "pleated or folded bread". The mention of filo is documented in the Topkapı Palace during the time of the Ottoman Empire. Ultimately many historians will cite that the origin is not definitive but rather the dough has been an evolution over the various ages between many cultures and peoples.
Preparation
Filo dough is made with flour, water and a small amount of oil. Homemade filo takes time and skill, requiring progressive rolling and stretching to a single thin and very large sheet. A very big table is used, preferably with a marble top. If the dough is stretched by hand, a long, thin rolling pin is used, with continual flouring between layers to prevent the sheets from sticking to one another. In modern times, mechanical rollers are also used. Prior to World War I, households in Istanbul typically had two filo makers to prepare razor thin sheets for baklava, and the relatively thicker sheets used for börek. Fresh and frozen versions are prepared for commercial markets.
Use
When using filo to make pastries, the thin layers are made by first rolling out the sheets of dough to the final thickness, then brushing them with oil, or melted butter for some desserts, and stacking them. This contrasts with puff pastry and croissant doughs, where the layers are stacked into a thick layer of dough, then folded and rolled out multiple times to produce a laminated dough containing thin layers of dough and fat. Filo can be used in many ways: layered, folded, rolled, or ruffled, with various fillings.
The English term comes from the φύλλο which means leaf. A popular Albanian dish called flia, or fli, may have been an early form of filo. In Albanian, fije/fli translates as both "sheet" and "leaf" just like φύλλο in Greek. The Turkish nameyufka means both the thin dough used for baklava and börek, and a kind of flatbread, also called sac ekmeği, cooked on a sac, a domed metal plate. In Arabic countries filo is called reqaqot.
