Filo

Filo (from Greek *fýllo*, meaning "leaf")—also called yufka in Turkish (from an Old Turkic word for "slender" or "thin")—is an unleavened pastry dough rolled to extreme thinness. To make baked goods, many sheets of filo are stacked, each brushed with oil or butter, then baked. The paper-thin version of this dough was perfected in the Ottoman Empire’s palace kitchens by the 15th century, and it became the base for pastries like baklava and börek, both sweet and savory, which later diversified in shape. The earliest recorded use of the word "filo" in English appeared in the *Atlanta Constitution* in 1946. Commercially produced filo became common in supermarkets during the 1970s. Note that the thin flatbread called yufka is thicker than standard filo sheets and is usually prepared differently.

The earlier origin of filo is debated. Many food historians argue that filo evolved from yufka, a thin layered flatbread developed by Turkic peoples of Central Asia during the medieval period, often served folded or stacked with butter or fillings. The 11th-century Turkic dictionary *Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk* records the term *yuvgha*, an archaic form of yufka, meaning "pleated or folded bread," and describes a variety so fragile it crumbled at the touch, as well as a preparation where dough was folded and fried in butter, a technique still used for börek. In 1433, the French pilgrim Bertrandon de la Brocquière observed Turcoman nomads in the mountains of Antakya making thin cakes of bread, which they rolled out rapidly with a small wooden roller and cooked on a convex iron plate; he noted they were thinner than wafers and eaten filled with curdled milk. This bread was called yufka. Some credit the Greeks, citing a mention of a bread and walnut sweet in Homer’s *Odyssey* and a description of a cheesecake in a fifth-century BC poem, though ancient sources give no details on how such pies were made. The Byzantine sweet *koptoplakous* has been described as the same as Turkish baklava, consisting of two pastry sheets filled with chopped nuts and honey, itself descending from the placenta cake. However, food writer Aglaia Kremezi contends the placenta cake was probably very different from modern filo pastries, requiring transformation before becoming the paper-thin dough of today.