Our Homemade Filo Dough
At Dimashq, we make our filo (phyllo) dough from scratch following traditional Syrian methods. What makes Syrian filo dough unique is its simplicity. The dough can be made using only three ingredients: flour, water, and salt.
We add three more ingredients to our dough: cane sugar, homemade cane sugar syrup, and clarified butter. The sugar and syrup help with achieving the desired golden color while baking and also give the baklava a crunchier texture. Clarified butter softens the dough.
Kneading
We start by sifting the flour and adding it into the stand mixer bowl. We add the salt and sugar and start the mixer. On the side, we mix the syrup with some of the water and add it to the flour mix. When the water and syrup have been absorbed, we slowly incorporate the water into the mix.
When the flour has properly absorbed all the water and a dough is formed, we add the clarified butter and continue mixing until the dough is smooth and soft to the touch.
After kneading, we cover the dough and let it rest for 15 minutes.
Resting Again, Cutting, and Starching
When our dough is ready, we shape it by hand similar to an oval bread loaf, cover it, and let it rest again for 30 minutes.
After resting, we roll the dough back and forth by hand while stretching it, until it is about 15 inches in length. We then cut the dough into twelve, 90g pieces.
We gently press the pieces by hand and starch them with sifted wheat starch.
Rolling, Starching Again, and Resting Again
The next step is rolling each piece with a rolling pin into a round shape, about 7 inches in diameter, and then starching it with sifted wheat starch. We repeat the process for each piece and stack the round dough layers on each other.
Then, we grab the 12-layer stack (carefully) and place it in a food storage bag and let it rest for an hour.
More Rolling, More Starching
After an hour, we take our dough stack out of the bag and grab two layers at a time. We use the rolling pin to roll those two pieces while stacked. In this step, we roll from the edge into the center of the dough while turning the dough after each roll until the entire edge is rolled and a bump has formed in the center. We then gently flatten the bump by hand and use the rolling pin to roll the two stacked pieces into a bigger round shape, around 14-15 inches in diameter.
We repeat this step and stack the rolled dough layers on each other until we have a 12-layer stack again. Now comes the final starching stage.
We carefully grab one dough layer at a time and starch it with sifted wheat starch. We grab another layer and slide it on top of the starched layer and starch it. We repeat the process until we have starched all the layers.
Pressing, Rolling, Pressing, Rolling
Our junior rolling pin has now served its purpose, we put it away and grab our 36-inch senior rolling pin for the final rolling stage.
Before we start rolling, we press into the center of the dough stack with our hands and then press toward the edge in all directions. We then grab the top 4-5 layers and flip them on the stack, and then we flip the entire stack over and repeat the pressing process. Whenever we press or roll the stack, the top few layers will become bigger, that is why we have to flip the layers to maintain equally shaped and sized layers.
We now grab the senior rolling pin and roll from the center toward the edge. We roll vertically, horizontally, and diagonally to maintain a round shape.
After each round of rolling, we roll the entire dough stack around the rolling pin and press on it with our hands in a back-and-forth motion, starting from the center and moving our hands toward the ends of the rolled dough to stretch it.
Now, we turn the rolling pin so that the dough stack is hanging over the pin and facing us. We grab the top 4-5 layers carefully (which were the bottom layers while rolling) and flip them behind the rolling pin. Then, we grab the rolling pin and unroll the dough backwards, so that the flipped layers are now laid out on top of the stack and are unaligned. We roll the unaligned layers with the pin and unroll them on top of the stack to align the layers. We repeat this rolling and pressing process until we reach our desired size, around 36 inches in diameter.
Our homemade filo dough is now ready.
