Day 8: Oppah!
After making Baklava with ready phyllo pastry during the Mediterranean class of "No Reservations", I went back home and looked up how phyllo pastry was made. This is what I found. Isn' it extraordinary how wide and thin a little wheat-and-water dough can be stretched?
It looked like such a delicate and masterful task I couldn't even fathom that it could be done at home, until I found this video further down the list under the same search heading. At first I though, it must be much harder than it looks. But today I decided to give it a shot, making a small batch of dough for a small Spanakopita.
I think it actually worked! It took me about an hour to assemble the entire pie, but it was a process I thoroughly enjoyed. It was such fun stretching the glutenous dough into thin, translucent sheets! If you keep the dough moist enough and work delicately it just stretches with such ease and you can actually see the layers of gluten fibers get stretched out, becoming thinner and thinner! Although I tore a few holes in every sheet I made, making sheet after sheet by rolling it out a little and then gently pulling the edges to stretch, was actually quite a relaxing process.
The Spanakopita pie turned out fairly good, and while the inner layers of phyllo remained thin and flaked apart a little, the top most layer wasn't nearly as flaky and thin as it should have been. Instead it was firm and crisp.
Oh well, it was such a fun process, I'll definitely give it another shot soon and hope it turns out flakier. Maybe next time I'll use it for Baklava!
It looked like such a delicate and masterful task I couldn't even fathom that it could be done at home, until I found this video further down the list under the same search heading. At first I though, it must be much harder than it looks. But today I decided to give it a shot, making a small batch of dough for a small Spanakopita.
I think it actually worked! It took me about an hour to assemble the entire pie, but it was a process I thoroughly enjoyed. It was such fun stretching the glutenous dough into thin, translucent sheets! If you keep the dough moist enough and work delicately it just stretches with such ease and you can actually see the layers of gluten fibers get stretched out, becoming thinner and thinner! Although I tore a few holes in every sheet I made, making sheet after sheet by rolling it out a little and then gently pulling the edges to stretch, was actually quite a relaxing process.
The Spanakopita pie turned out fairly good, and while the inner layers of phyllo remained thin and flaked apart a little, the top most layer wasn't nearly as flaky and thin as it should have been. Instead it was firm and crisp.
Oh well, it was such a fun process, I'll definitely give it another shot soon and hope it turns out flakier. Maybe next time I'll use it for Baklava!
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