The basic recipe for filo dough usually consists of only four ingredients: Flour, water, oil, and salt. You make a dough, you roll it out, and voila; filo dough. I’m paraphrasing a bit here, but on paper these simple ingredients are very unassuming. The recipe itself looks almost…easy.
And in a way, I guess it is easy. But if my studies at this university have shown me something, it’s that human skill that can make simple ingredients into something truly complex, something of quality. Anyone can mash grapes for wine, turn milk into cheese, or throw flour and water together for dough. It’s easy. But in the end, it’s really not about the ingredients, however simple or few they may be. And on a small side street in Rethymnon, on the northern coast of Crete, Yiorgos Hatziparaskos is consistently proving that, turning out handmade filo dough with the belief that quality is better than quantity, and that patience and skill are two more ingredients that help define such a quality product.
Now, I have a love/hate relationship with filo dough. While learn how to make it in cooking school, I enjoyed every painstaking minute of it. But I enjoyed it because the instructors kept telling us we’d most likely never make it again, that in a professional kitchen it took up too much valuable time and effort. Besides, there is some decent mass-produced dough on the market. So I know what kind of patience and skill is required to make filo dough by hand; I also know that I don’t have it. This is why I respect this man even more. As one of the last producers of hand-made filo dough in Greece, his stuff is not just good; it’s amazing.
On the tongue, the raw dough tastes papery, but without the crumbly texture typical of store-bought filo dough. Yet, on a basic level, there is nothing terribly mind-blowing or ethereal about it, just thin powdery dough sticking to the roof of your mouth. But in your hands, it’s so much more. It’s not like most dough, which can fall apart if you look at it wrong. Scrunch up a sheet of Yiorgos’s dough into a ball (indeed, he did just that,) and then shake it out again like a paper towel commercial, and it doesn’t break. It’s thin enough to see the wrinkles in your hand, but it wouldn’t tear nearly as easily as the mass-produced filo dough most people are used to. That’s what makes it so special. It isn’t some ground-breaking new recipe, and like most dough, it adds texture and body to a dish rather than flavor. But it’s clear that the man knows his dough. For Yiorgos, repetition has translated into consistency, and his filo dough is consistently quality in its composition. It’s something that anyone will realize the moment they feel and taste it.
Off to the side, Yiorgos’s wife silently cuts small pieces of baklava, crunchy pastries of her husband’s product layered with pistachios and dripping with honey; you can’t leave without trying something that showcases his hard work in its intended form. Her quiet sales pitch works, and the product speaks for itself. The flaky pastry crackles and breaks cleanly, without the usual cascading shards sputtering out of your mouth. This means it’s hasn’t lost its texture, but it’s still moist enough to stay together. It’s everything you could want from filo dough. As I eat, I’m already thinking about his dough wrapped around the wild asparagus and goat cheese found on Crete, or as a delicate topping for strawberries and black pepper. Food that makes you think is food that you can certainly enjoy.
And Yiorgos clearly enjoys his work. He plays the showman for groups who come to see him work, but you can see in the way that he handles the dough and from the aura he exudes while he putters around in a cloud of flour that it’s not a chore for him, but a pleasure. When someone is so excited about what they’re doing, it makes you all the more excited to be a part of it. And with Yiorgos’s excitement, flour, water, oil and salt became a simply complex wonder.
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