I’ll be honest, I haven’t made this dough since I took cooking classes. Why? Making it isn’t hard, but it is pretty time-consuming, and who has time to spare these days? Second, it’s rough on the wrists, and mine are already in bad shape, so I tend to avoid it. Lastly, making phyllo involves a lot of cornstarch, and I personally hate the feeling of it on my hands.
Since I had a specific recipe in mind that called for this dough, I decided to make it from scratch instead of buying it frozen from the store. I didn’t do a side-by-side comparison, but I’d safely assume homemade is better — though the effort-to-reward ratio probably isn’t the best investment of time, at least for me.
Out of everything you can make homemade, this is probably the one thing I’d skip and just buy at the store.
Enough complaining from me — let’s get rolling.
(Experiment 270) Phyllo dough
Ingredients
- 250 g all-purpose flour
- 1 tsp salt
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 3 tsp olive oil
- 2 tsp vinegar
- 96 g warm water ~100F
- cornstarch
Instructions
- In a stand mixer bowl put the flour, vinegar, salt, baking powder, olive oil and about half the water. Using the dough hook mix on low for about a minute then add the remaining water. You can increase speed a little and kneed for 2 minutes. You will have a nice non-sticky ball.
- Wrap the ball in plastic film and let it rest on your countertop for 90 minutes or so
- Now before you continue, weigh your dough. We will divide this into 20 pieces so we want equal pieces.
- My ball weighted 387g so I made small balls that weighed 26-27g. I made 14 balls ( I did have some leftover but my wrists were killing me so I discarded the remaining) and covered them with a clean dishcloth.
- For the next step, you press multiple doughs together. At first, maybe do 3 at a time until you are comfortable to do more at once.
- Dust your work surface with cornstarch and using a rolling pin flatten the dough into a 6″ circle. Dust the dough with cornstarch again and repeat with another ball. When you are done with the second dough, place it on top of the first one and cover it with cornstarch. Repeat with another one, I do 5-6 at a time but if it’s too hard for you simply do less at a time.
- With the flattened dough, using the rolling pin keep flattening the doughs. Check that the dough doesn’t stick together, if it is sticky dust some more cornstarch. Keep rolling the dough until you reach paper-thin thickness, the dough should be stretched about 12″
- Pile on parchment paper, repeat for another stack of dough. When you are done, put another parchment paper on top and roll it. Wrap in plastic film and put in the refrigerator. Use within a week.
