Spanakopita

This is yet another post about dough. This one is a pastry dough called "phyllo", the Greek word for leaf. That name is very general, as it applies to any kind of dough that is rolled into a thin leaf. This specific one is a recipe I got from grandma, and is really good for making pitas. It's very similar to standard puff pastry (or pâte feuilletée) except there's no folding of the dough, resulting in a puff pastry with fewer, thicker layers.

The ingredients are the simplest ever: flour, water, salt. Like the original puff pastry, this one is unleavened. Start with two cups of flour and a pinch of salt, and keep adding water and kneading until you get a soft dough that doesn't stick to your hands. If you add too much water add more flour. Knead for about 10 minutes, then refridgerate for half an hour at least.

Take it out of the fridge, and roll it with your hands into a long worm, about 2 inches in diameter. Then cut that in half, again and again, until you get 8 to 16 pieces, the size of mandarin oranges. A kilogram of flour gives 16 small pieces.

Roll each piece around in your hands to make it a bit more spherical, and press it down on the table to flatten it with your palm. Using a rolling pin, roll each into a circle of about 5 inches in diameter.

Take some softened butter or margerine with your fingers, and rub it softly on each circle before you stack the next one on top. I made 4 stacks of 4 pieces each, with butter inbetween. Don't butter the bottom and top layers! Then refridgerate for 20 minutes. At this point, if you have made too much dough, you can wrap each stack in tinfoil or plastic wrap and freeze them. Take them out of the freezer to thaw the day before you need it, it's as good as fresh.

When ready to use, sprinkle flour on the table, and gently roll each stack into a thin wide sheet. It doesn't have to be extremely thin, 1mm thick is fine. Yielding to popular demand, I made mine into a spanakopita. This might seem like a sacrilege to many fellow Greeks, but I don't like feta, so my pita was cheeseless.

For the stuffing, chop and blanch the spinach for 3-4 minutes to soften it a bit, drain and mix with chopped dill, scallion and parsley. Add one egg (or two if you have a lot of stuffing), salt and pepper, a couple of spoons of olive oil, and mix. You can add feta to taste, too.

Then roll one of the sheets of dough around the rolling pin and transfer it on an oven pan. Stretch it to cover the whole pan, with some dough over the edges. Sprinkle some olive oil and add another sheet if you rolled them too thin. Spread the stuffing all over, and then transfer another sheet of dough over it, also stretching it to go a bit over the edges.

Drizzle some olive oil on top, and add another layer of dough, if it's too thin. My first top-layer wasn't big enough so I used a second, wider layer on top of it. Make sure you oil or butter the dough around the edges in between the sheets. This is not the time to cut down on fats, so use lots of oil on the edges.

Then roll the dough that is hanging over the edges, to seal it around. This is my favorite part of the pita, the rolled and crunchy phyllo at the corner piece. Again, make sure it's oiled there. Finally, sprinkle some extra oil on top, mark pieces with a knife, stab it a few times to let the steam out during cooking, and bake in low to medium heat for about an hour, to an hour and a half.

Unfortunately my gas oven only heats things from underneath, so I didn't get the golden-brown color that I should...

... luckily, people still liked it.