The pie and pastry bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum

Author:Rose Levy Beranbaum
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: SCRIBNER
Published: 1998-05-08T16:00:00+00:00

FILLO

Fillo (FEElo)—also spelled phyllo—strudel, and puff pastry are all members of the pastry leaf family. In fact, the word fillo means leaf in Greek. Its origins go back over two thousand years to Persia, Turkey, and Egypt. It has been speculated that the first fillo pastry was baklava, created in Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. Fillo traveled to Hungary, where it became the base for strudel. This type of pastry is considered to be the mother of French puff pastry. There is a profound relationship between these three pastries.

I once enjoyed a pastry case filled with seafood at a restaurant in New York City called Capsuto Fræres, owned by three charming Egyptian brothers. The pastry seemed like the lightest puff pastry I had ever experienced. Intrigued, I asked one of the fræres and was embarrassed to discover that it was not puff pastry at all, but fillo. I shouldn’t have been so hard on myself though, because on analyzing the doughs, I realized that the light flaky layers of both doughs are, in fact, made of the same elements, but created in different ways. For puff pastry, the butter is rolled into thin sheets between layers and folds of dough; for fillo, the dough is pulled very thin and the butter, which is melted and clarified, is then brushed on each layer, together with a sprinkling of sugar and/or ground nuts or bread crumbs to keep them separate during baking. (Using unclarified butter for fillo would keep it from being as crisp. The opposite is true for puff pastry, where the water in the unclarified butter is needed to create steam to separate the layers.)

If the equivalent amount of flour used for puff pastry were used to make fillo, and the dough cut to the same finished size and then stacked, there would be 76 separate layers. Though mathematically (and microscopically) puff pastry given 6 turns has 729 layers, these layers are not distinct and separate as are the fillo layers, so the fillo is lighter and crisper. Layers of butter-brushed fillo can, therefore, be used in place of puff pastry in, for example, the Classic Napoleon (page 457). Use 20 layers of fillo to replace puff pastry rolled ¼ inch thick.

The dough to which the Greek fillo has the closest kinship is the Austro/ Hungarian strudel. They both consist of the same ingredients: unbleached flour, salt, water, and oil (some recipes for each include eggs or egg whites; I find the dough more tender without them). If both are handmade, the only perceptible difference comes from the type of flour used and how thin the dough is pulled (or rolled, as is the case with authentic fillo). The greater difference comes from the fact that if you want a large sheet of strudel dough, you have to make it yourself, whereas commercial machine-made fillo dough can be purchased.* Handmade strudel dough, using about 10 ounces of flour, if stretched to 48 inches and trimmed, weighs about 7 ounces. The equivalent amount of fillo, for a 16-inch roll, would be six 12- by 17-inch sheets, which weigh about 3.

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