[Sca-cooks] Phyllo Re: Corn Flakes (Was: Period Baklava)

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Apr 6, 2007, at 3:38 AM, ranvaig at columbus.rr.com wrote:

>>
>> I've never seen a recipe for phyllo, which is precisely my point. I
>> have read descriptions of the process. I've also seen recipes for
>> strudel dough, varak/borek, and a variety of others, but while many
>> of them call for a dough, none of them were Greek or specifically
>> called the final product phyllo; they were recipes for various pastry
>> sheets that appeared in some ways like phyllo, but also might have
>> been like lasagne, spring roll wrappers, strudel, etc. The only thing
>> I can be absolutely certain of is their similarity to phyllo in that
>> they produce a wheat-flour-based sheet of pastry rolled and/or
>> stacked in layers. The rest may still be supposition.
>
> I don't think you can claim that Phyllo is Greek and only Greek.

I'm not making that claim. I'm saying that a claim made about borek  
or strudel may be true of them without necessarily being true of  
phyllo, and claiming that they're the same thing because they have  
similar characteristics because they're the same thing therefore they  
must be identical because they're all the same thing therefore  
everything said about one applies to the other because they're the  
same thing, is faulty logic.

>   The
> same dough is used with many names, and sometimes the same name is
> used for different recipes.

I'm sure there are similar recipes with many names, but I'm not sure  
how "the same" they are. Different flours, different water, slightly  
different techniques and use. One person's nitpicking is another's  
crucial detail. But I think that some of this is equivocation rather  
than identity: two things appearing to be the same thing (but may not  
be), and then tailoring definitions to support that idea.

For example, strudel has significant differences from phyllo, the  
biggest probably being that it often contains both eggs and butter.  
It's stretched in a continuous sheet maybe five feet across. Now, you  
can make something called strudel using commercial phyllo dough,  
which comes in egg-and-butter-free-until-you-add-melted-butter-after- 
the-fact sheets maybe 12 x 15 inches, or whatever they are, call that  
strudel and ignore the differences, and then think that since both  
are used to make something called strudel, they must be the same  
thing. But that's bad logic.

>   B modern recipes aren't hard to find.
> Many Middle Eastern books have a description, if not an actual
> recipe.  A short websearch found quite a few.   Flour, water, and a
> little salt.  Sometimes a little vinegar to make the gluten relax,
> and oil to make it easier to roll.  Rolled out until you can see
> through it

Well, except when it contains eggs, or baking powder, has a neutral- 
pH distilled spirit added _in lieu of vinegar_ (no difference there,  
right?), is stretched, or is rolled out to a setting of nine out of a  
possible ten in a pasta machine, which is not translucent, let alone  
transparent, and neither is commercial phyllo, for that matter. These  
are differences that are being ignored because they don't support the  
premise, which is that these things are all essentially the same. I  
suspect the reason these things are being considered the same is a  
general cultural pressure to forget three recipes where one will do,  
and that one is included mostly for nostalgia's sake since most  
people use commercial phyllo anyway ;-).
>
> http://www.recipelink.com/mf/0/71204 "My Grandmother made it all the
> time. Greek or not, fillo is phylo is strudel dough.:

See above. This is the one with baking powder, and it's repeated at  
least three times in the ensuing links. There are actually three,  
maybe four recipes given, total, and one recipe search engine. I  
actually like the Lior recipe, the one that measures ingredients in  
spoonsful, very much. I once had to edit a series of recipes for a  
cookbook put out by my son's elementary school, and one, which turned  
out to be for a Greek strudel-like pastry filled with pumpkin (I  
forget the name, but it ended in "-pita", which is no surprise), was  
rather difficult to follow until I sat it down next to a strudel  
recipe and realized what was supposed to be going on.

Adamantius





"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la  
brioche!" / "If there's no bread, you have to say, let them eat cake!"
     -- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques Rousseau,  
"Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
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