Recipe: Spanokopita or Greek spinach pie

My mother sent me off to university with a folder full of her recipes, including this one for spinach pie. It’s one of my very favourite meals and always a hit in my household. I love the combination of sweet spinach with rich, salty feta, wrapped in delicious flaky pastry.

You can use the same filling for cheese and spinach triangles, which make great party food. I usually make a pie, which is less fiddly and makes a good vegetarian main course. It’s actually incredibly easy – about 20 minutes prep and then it bakes in the oven for 45 minutes to an hour.

Spinach and friends

The pie is named after Popeye’s favourite food but you can actually use a variety of leaves, not just spinach. The term “spinach” has different meanings in different countries anyway.

In Australia, there is a vegetable with white stems and shiny, rippled, dark green leaves that tastes very similar to spinach. Australians often call this “spinach” or, when they are being precise, they call it “silverbeet”. True spinach is usually called “English spinach”.

In the UK, “English spinach” is just called “spinach”. It’s fine to use this, though I would recommend you get the adult leaves if you can. The baby spinach leaves used for salad are expensive and the flavour is not as strong, which is great for eating them raw but not so suitable for cooking. I have also tried frozen spinach and this works fine but the flavour is not as good.

You can also get “silverbeet” in the UK except here it’s called “Swiss chard”. There is also a variant called “rainbow chard”, which has a bright red stem and some red colouring on the mostly green leaves. You can use either type and the taste will be similar, but obviously the rainbow version will add pretty red streaks to the white and green of the pie filling.

Last year I did a food writing course at the Arvon Foundation with Sophie Grigson and Alastair Hendy. With eight budding food writers on the course, plus our tutors and the Arvon staff, we ate fabulous meals almost every night. Since we had vegetarians on the course, I contributed this pie to one of the meals. We had a bit of a shortage of either chard or spinach but Sophie taught me that you can use the stems and leaves of beetroot. Meanwhile, John who works at Arvon, taught me that you can use the tender new leaves of stinging nettle, and we actually went out the back of the farmhouse in Devon where the Arvon courses are taught and collected nettle to add to the pie.

Sophie suggested it should really be called “green pie”, but I persist in calling it “spinach pie” since that’s what I grew up calling it, and I think it’s more meaningful to most people.

My personal preference is to use silverbeet/chard, which has a sweeter flavour than English spinach, and I use the stems as well, finely sliced to give it extra texture and flavour. Some spinach pie recipes use ricotta but I prefer my version, with feta and cottage cheese.

Pastry and friends

A friend in Austria told me that he makes his filo from scratch. This impresses me enormously but it’s a highly specialist skill so I do recommend you buy filo – this is what most professionals do anyway. Filo is generally for sale in both the refrigerated section and frozen aisle of the supermarket. I prefer the refrigerated kind as it’s ready to work with immediately. If you can only find the frozen kind, you will need to let it thaw as it is very brittle when frozen. Don’t try microwaving it as the pastry will stick together and turn into glue! It sometimes comes in two sizes – buy the bigger one if possible, but you can get pretty good results by layering smaller sheets if necessary.

It is essential to brush oil or melted butter between each sheet of pastry as this is what gives it the lovely flaky layered effect. Otherwise the pastry sticks together in clumps and is quite dull. My mother always used melted butter but I generally use oil as it’s healthier and also easier since you don’t have to melt it first. I’ve been told that egg whites are a substitute but this didn’t work for me – I just wound up with all the pastry sticking together in one ultra crunchy sheet. I’ve also been told that a mix of whole eggs and milk beaten together can also work – this worked better but was not wholly satisfactory either. I would say stick to oil and if you are trying to reduce fat, you could probably get away with only brushing every second sheet.

Recipe

Ingredients

Filo pastry, 12 sheets

Oil (olive oil is nice but any plain cooking oil is fine) or melted butter, 100g

Spinach or silverbeet/chard or other green leaves, 2 bunches or 1 generous bunch

Plain cottage cheese, 200g

Feta cheese, 200g (chopped into small cubes)

Eggs, 3 (it doesn’t really matter if they are medium or large but do buy free range or organic if you can!)

Garlic, 1 clove (crushed or finely chopped)

Salt and pepper

Method

1. Pre-heat the oven to 180C.
2. Rinse the spinach well. Plunge it into boiling water for a minute or two and then drain. Leave to cool and then ring the leaves out by hand to remove as much liquid as possible.
3. Mix the eggs, feta, cottage cheese, garlic, and salt and pepper in a bowl. Mix in the leaves.
4. Take a rectangular baking dish and layer six sheets of pastry, brushing oil or melted butter between each sheet.
5. Spoon the spinach and cheese on top of the pastry and spread evenly.
6. Add another six layers of pastry, brushing oil between each layer and on the top sheet (this will make it brown).
7. Bake in the oven until golden brown. This will take at least 45 minutes and may take up to an hour and 15 minutes depending on your oven. You can turn up the oven a little but not too much as you want the filling to cook through without burning the pastry.
8. Serves four to six people. It’s nice with a green salad or some roast pumpkin/squash.

I hope you enjoy it! This is definitely something that I would recommend trying and you can make adjustments to suit your own taste and lifestyle.