[Sca-cooks] Pastillus

[Siegfried Heydrich]

    I've found that working phyllo is a 2 person job, and the easiest thing
to do is to have a (food safe) pump sprayer full of melted butter kept in a
bain marie when not actually spraying. One person flips the sheets while the
other sprays and adds fillings. Being in a cool, fairly high humidity
environment helps, too.
    Doing it alone generally results in somewhere between a third and a
quarter of the sheets getting ruined, but are still useable. They just look
like tatters . . . And yes, have EVERYTHING ready before you open the
package of dough, the time you have to work it is very short, indeed.
    For wrapping breasts in phyllo , I found that if you spray & lay the
sheets, fold them in half, and then lay the breast and wrap it in the
buttered layers, it's a whole lot easier than wrapping each sheet
individually.

    Sieggy

----- Original Message -----
[[EL SNIPPO GRANDO]]
>
> OK, well admittedly the stuff I've used was filo dough, which may be
> different, but:
> 1. It dries out really quickly even indoors.  Every time you take a layer
off
> the stack to add to your dish or whatever, you have to cover the rest
> immediately with damp toweling.  When it dries, it either sticks together
or
> cracks and falls apart.
> 2. Pretty much every layer needs to be swabbed with melted butter as soon
as
> you lay it down.
> So at the point the process is:  Prepare all work surfaces beforehand -
know
> where things are going, have wet towels ready, butter melted, etc.  Remove
> dough from package, unroll onto designated surface, peel off one sheet and
> cover remainder immediately.  Lay out first sheet.  Brush with butter.
> Uncover, get second sheet, cover, lay out, brush, repeat ad infinitum.
> 3.  It takes a bloody long time.  To cover single boned chicken breast
(well,
> half breasts) in a wrapping took nearly an hour for about 6 pieces.  By
the
> end of that time, the dough had dried out even under the towelling and I
> ended up throwing the rest of it out.