Filo is a dough that is widely used in Turkish and Georgian cuisine for baking sweet and savory dishes. Translated from Greek, filo means leaf. The dough is rolled into a sheet as thin as paper, each layer is greased with oil to make a crisp. They make famous baklava, pies, envelopes, rolls, pies with different fillings from this test.
The filo dough recipe is popular not only in the Mediterranean countries, but also in many others, for example, Austria, Hungary and Germany, where strudel is baked from it. True European filo recipe contains eggs. The dough is rolled into a sheet as thin as paper, each layer is greased with oil to make a crisp.
Ready-made frozen filo dough can be bought at the supermarket in the cakes department. Before use, the dough must be thawed, which can take the whole night. If you do not plan to use all the dough leaves, take out as much as necessary, and put the rest back in the freezer. But still, the best option is to prepare the test yourself.
The pulled out leaflets need to be greased with oil so that they do not stick together, stacked, covered with cling film, and put a wet towel on top, since the open sheet will dry out very quickly and will crumble when it starts to wrap the filling. A wet towel should not touch the sheets, otherwise the dough will become sour.
But if there is no dough on sale, and you decided to tinker in the kitchen and bake sweet baklava or filo pastry pie, you can cook it yourself. If you do not know how to make filo dough, we offer you a simple recipe. In fact, the filo recipe exists in two versions - with and without an egg. Both options are very simple and knead the same way, and the main difficulty is to roll it correctly - after all, the filo dough should be almost transparent. And here you need to know one very important rule - for rolling you can use only corn starch, and not wheat flour. Therefore, before you make filo dough, check if you have corn starch at home.
The filo dough recipe contains the following ingredients:
* Flour 350 gr
* Egg 1 piece
* Wine vinegar and vegetable oil for 1 tablespoon
*Salt
* Water 150 milliliters
*Corn starch
If the dough is without an egg, then the amount of water needs to be slightly increased. To prepare the dough, salt is mixed with flour and poured into a cup with a slide, in the center of which a depression is made. They pour oil, vinegar, warm water, an egg and knead a soft, elastic dough. Water needs to be added a little, kneading the dough well to such a consistency that it easily rolls out. The finished dough needs to be beaten several times, rolled into a bun and forcefully thrown onto the table, then put to rest for 40 minutes. After that, divide the dough into several parts, make balls, put in the refrigerator and cover with a napkin so that it does not dry out.
Each piece needs to be rolled out very thinly. To speed up the process, you can roll out three balls at once, for this each ball needs to be slightly rolled out, sprinkled with starch as it should, and stack the resulting layers on top of each other.
To make a pie from filo dough, you need to take a dough sheet, grease it with oil and put a second one on top, which is also greased with oil. Put a filling in the middle of the square, for example, a ready-made jam, cover with a corner and grease with oil. Then cover with corners on the sides and grease again. Wrapping the last corner, grease the whole pie with butter and put on a baking sheet.
Put the pies in a preheated oven and bake at a temperature of 180 degrees for 15 minutes. Ready-made pies should turn out golden and with a crispy crust. As the filling, you can use minced meat, fish, cheese, apples and much more.