Hi!  I am Rose H, a 58 year old grandmother of two from Chicago, USA and I love cooking and traveling around the world. We are very lucky in our country to have such a rich tapestry of wonderful cuisines, brought by all the immigrants that make up our nation. It's even a greater treat to be able to taste some of these dishes where they originated. Here is what I have learned about the famous baklava, phyllo dough and strudel during my travels.

Even though the word 'phyllo/filo, meaning leaf, is Greek, this dough and the famous baklava typically made using layers of thin filo is really an old Turkish invention. The Turks have a rich culinary tradition with a class of foods called 'Borek' (which I will call pie for our purposes) that use various thicknesses of white wheat flour dough, multi layered with savory or sweet fillings and then typically baked in an oven. The savory pies include ispanak borek (spinach pie), kiyma borek (meat pie), peynir borek (cheese pie), talas borek, and su borek. The most common "sweet pie" is baklava made from tissue thin dough. Baklava was introduced in the US by the Greek and Middle Eastern immigrants who themselves learned it from the Turks during the Ottoman Empire's rule of the region for over 400 years.

One can find an astounding number of varieties of this dessert in the many local baklava specialty shops in Istanbul, a huge metropolis in today's Turkey. You can eat it in delicate coils, squares, gathered to pretty rounds, or diamonds, and filled with many different nuts including pistachios, walnuts, or even cream. Always bathed in just the right amount of syrup, with a sprinkling of finely grated green pistachios, it is a perfect accompaniment to another original, the rich, thick espresso-like Turkish coffee, a sure fire way to please a sweet tooth. 

In his recently published book, "The KaffeeHaus", here is what the award winning cookbook author, and Bon Appetit magazine contributor Rick Rodgers wrote about the influence of Turkish filo dough making on Austrian-Hungarian Strudels:

"The thin, parchment-like pastry that surrounds the apples in an Austro-Hungarian strudel is really filo-dough, another culinary inheritance from the Turks. The major difference is that most filo recipes layer the dough with the filling in a pan, but most strudels are wound around their fillings."  Hence the name Strudel literally meaning vortex. Since the Turks were in Hungary for more than a hundred years before they tried to conquer Vienna, Mr. Rodgers adds that strudel is even more established in the coffeehouses of Budapest. So that's the story of "Strudel" and "Phyllo/Filo" dough, a major contribution to our culinary world by the Turkish chefs.