NEW YORK (NYTimes) - You think you are pretty good at something until you meet someone who has been doing it for 41 years. Such was my experience, at least, with the apparently simple act of rolling out pastry very, very thin.

My first steps into the world of food were, as I have written here before, as a pastry chef. And even when I focused on the savoury side of things, the fact that I'd cut my teeth in the pastry kitchen had instilled a base-level confidence.

I was delighted with the cherry-and-almond strudels I made from scratch in cooking school, for example, accentuating the folds and creases in the paper-thin pastry with bits of intentionally burned confectioners' sugar and butter.

Later, when I became a pastry chef and often used commercial strudel pastry and phyllo rather than making my own, I thought the process was like riding a bike: Once you've learned, you never forget.

Or do you? Three snapshots from a television series I made in 2012, Mediterranean Feast, might prove otherwise.

The first is from Le Saf Saf, a restaurant in the coastal town of La Marsa, near Tunis, that was home to a friendly camel and was known for its brik parcels. Here, tissue-paper-thin warka pastry - like phyllo but a bit more robust - was filled with harissa, egg and tuna before being quickly folded and fried. The result was so crisp and thin you could see the egg through the skin. "There's nothing to it," I made the mistake of saying after watching a few being made.

But translating those words into action was one of my many reminders that if you want to get good at something, you have to put in the hours.

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell set the magic number for true expertise at 10,000 hours. Assuming an eight-hour work day, that might look like 1,250 days, or, give or take a few weekends and holidays, around four years. Le Saf Saf's brik parcels, like so many throughout the region, have been served for a good 40 years.

My training at cooking school and time as a pastry chef were beginning to look like preschool. After a few failed attempts to fold the pastry without creating a hole, I just pretended that there wasn't one and continued on. The result looked more like a shriveled roll than the perfectly flat calzone I was aiming for. I patted the camel goodbye and went on my way.

Snapshot No. 2 comes from Istanbul, where a national love of sweets tips into obsession when it comes to baklava, the simple dessert of phyllo pastry, nuts and syrup or honey. I visited one of the city's most celebrated baklava factories, Karakoy Gulluoglu, where production of the pastry is elevated to an art form.

The master baker, Mustafa, is a fifth-generation baker. I can't remember the last time I was both so in awe (while watching him work) and so terrified (while trying to help him work) of the same person.

After a team prayer and cheer, balls of dough were rolled and stretched again and again at a remarkable pace. They became thin enough to see through and so much like a billowy bedsheet that they could be flapped up in the air as if a bed were indeed being made.

Making pastry like this requires "hard work, attention, meticulous care and love," Mustafa told me. Check, check, check and check, I thought, reassuring myself. He had failed to mention that 41 years of experience would also help. What followed was nothing short of comedy as I got lost in the clouds of flour resulting from my trying to "help" and to roll out the pastry at a pace that would keep it from drying out.

In the third and final snapshot, I'm in Marrakech, trying my hand at warka sheets, used throughout Morocco in all sorts of savoury and sweet stuffed parcels: an egg-filled brik like the one I'd had at Le Saf Saf, cheese- or meat-packed triangles, cinnamon and nut-filled "cigars".

To stay with the cycling analogy: It's one thing to be overtaken by someone who has been pedaling for many years. It's quite another to be whizzed past by someone who looks barely old enough to own a bike. I was told this pastry maker was 15, but to me he didn't look a day over nine. He flipped and swirled his pastry with the sort of blind confidence I could only (and will only ever) dream of.

Rather than being rolled and stretched, as with phyllo and strudel, the warka pastry at this bakery was made round, like a crepe, by holding the sticky ball of dough in one hand and tapping it, bit by bit, around the flat surface of a hot iron pan. I'd never seen anything like it and found it impossible to get it right the first, second or 10th time around. "Five months," I was told, was how long it would take me to be able to make warka.

So I went to someone who, very kindly, reassured me it was not quite time to hang up my apron. Fouzia took me into her home kitchen and showed me the "cheats' way". Setting a frying pan atop a pot of boiling water, we brushed the runny batter onto the base of the pan. The crepe that soon appeared was, thankfully, magically easy to peel off the pan. At last, I was able to focus on making something with the pastry, rather than humiliating myself with making the pastry in the first place.

My hope with these snapshots is to reassure you that, compared with the experts, we're all on training wheels when it comes to making thin laminated pastry.

Don't be scared. Take delight in the fact that it isn't necessary for home cooks to make their own. There is enough good ready-made phyllo available. Brands do vary, though, so make sure that what you start with is of good quality.

Scrunch a sheet in one hand: If it's brittle and falls apart, it won't be a dream to work with. If it springs open, the quality is excellent. From there, just be liberal with the melted butter (this allows the sheets to separate and rise in the oven) and work quickly when brushing the sheets to prevent their drying out.

FETA AND HERB PHYLLO TART

Yield: 8 servings Total time: About 1½ hours