Phyllo the Magic Dough
Published February 21st, 2008
This post is an homage to phyllo pastry. Why? Phyllo is one of those hidden gems that we often think is limited to pre-prepared food, or restaurants and bakeries. Today, I’m going to tell you how you can bring it into your home, and add a whole new dimension to your cooking–with ease.
What is phyllo pastry?
Phyllo is razor thin sheets of a dough simply made of water, unleavened flour, and a small amount of oil. You may have seen it used in commercial foods such as Baklava or the Greek Spanakopita. This pastry is used in layers, and bakes up to be delightfully light, crispy, and delicious. Some people say it’s hard to work with, or only for advanced cooks–I promise, all lies–I’m all about breaking the recipe rules, and I haven’t managed to mess it up yet!
Working with the Dough
You can usually find the phyllo in a long skinny box in the freezer section at your grocery store. At my store, they keep it with the frozen pie shells. There is usually specific directions right on the box, but basically you can thaw it in the fridge overnight, or put it out at room temperature a few hours before use. The most important thing to remember with this dough, is to not let it dry out. You’ll normally be working with 2 or 3 layers at a time, so pull them out, roll everything else up again, and get it back into the bag right away.
Pull out either a regular or silicone pastry brush and spread some oil onto each layer. Traditionally, they’ve used melted butter, but you can also use margarine or even olive oil if you’re making something savoury. To make it easier on myself , starting from the bottom layer, I fold 1/2 of the sheet up and brush from the middle out and right to the corners, then stick it back down and do the top half until all the sheets are done. This works best for me, because then I’m not picking up the sheets, trying to line everything up, or have to worry about tearing when I handle it.
Now that you have everything greased and the pastry layers stuck together, cut it into what ever sized strips you need. This depends on the shape of the pastry you’re making, and how big you want it to be. The easiest thing to do, is actually use a clean pair of kitchen scissors to just cut through the pastry like a piece of paper. The basic shapes you might end up with are triangular spanakopita or turnovers, cylindrical spring rolls, rectangular pockets, or lining empty muffin tins to make fillable pastry cups. There’s usually detailed instructions for folding on the inside of the box or you can take look on the web if you get confused.
Seriously, don’t worry if the layers aren’t perfectly lined up–because it will taste delicious. You can’t really go wrong with covering pastry in a thin layer of melted butter! Really there’s no right or wrong answers as long as you find a way to contain the filling.
Once you’ve filled the pastry, you can use a bit more butter or oil to stick the edges together, and then a final slathering on the outside of the pastry to make sure that it gets nice and crispy in the oven.
Some ideas for fillings (these aren’t full step by step instructions, just some ideas for you to run with):
Spanakopita-After thawing and draining a package of frozen spinach, cook through in a frying pan with some salt, pepper, chopped garlic, and sliced up green onion. Pull it off the stove, strain off all of the liquid, and let it cool. Once cool, mash up a small brick of feta cheese and mix with the spinach filling. Drop the mixture by the spoonful onto your strips of prepared phyllo and fold into triangular pastries.
Dessert cups- Cut your prepared dough into circles and squish to line empty muffin tins. Bake until light golden brown at about 350 F and pull out to cool. You can fill them with anything from ice cream, to mousse, to fruit and whipped cream.
Turnovers-My husband once chopped up an apple, cooked it in a frying pan with a bit of butter, brown sugar and threw in some cinnamon and granola. He drained the mixture, let it cool and then made rectangular turnovers with the phyllo dough. It was so delicious that I honestly didn’t believe he made them until I saw the evidence!
Well, I hope this post has made you brave enough to work with the phyllo. Once you try it , you’ll see how easy it is to work with. Each box only costs a couple of dollars, and has many layers of pastry–so you get a lot of mileage out of it. Best of luck, and happy eating!
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