[6] In the fifth century BC, Philoxenos states in his poem "Dinner" that, in the final drinking course of a meal, hosts would prepare and serve cheesecake made with milk and honey that was baked into a pie.

[9] Some claim that the Turks also invented a form of filo/yufka independently in Central Asia;[6] the 11th-century Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk by Mahmud Kashgari records the meaning of yurgha, an archaic term for yufka, as "pleated or folded bread".

If the dough is stretched by hand, a long, thin rolling pin is used, with continual flouring between layers to prevent the sheets from sticking to one another.

In 1998, pastry chef and food historian Norman Lee Adler developed a method of layering filo with a fine mist of oil and covering it with a damp cloth, preventing it from drying out during extended handling.

When using filo to make pastries, the thin layers are made by first rolling out the sheets of dough to the final thickness, then brushing them with oil, or melted butter for some desserts, and stacking them.