Easy Spanakopita (Greek Spinach Pie)

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Hey everyone, welcome to the Loudmouth Kitchen. This is my kitchen. I’m your resident loudmouth, Dino. Today we’re diving into one of my favorite dishes from my Greek heritage, Spanacopita. It’s savory, flaky, cheesy, and surprisingly easy to make, right? A dish that feels like home, at least for me. Need a few simple ingredients, and in about 30 minutes, you’ll have this baby in the oven. Let’s go. So, I use baby spinach in a bag and somebody’s going to freak out about that, but whatever. Other people are going to tell me you need to wash it. It’s BS, man. It’s triple wash. It’s fine. I’ve never found any dirt in a bag of spinach. Leaks. Leaks can have dirt inside. So, you got to wash them. You just take the ends off. Then, you got to cut them right lengthwise like this. Oh, yeah. Look at that. Woo. It’s nasty. Okay, so I cut them down lengthwise in quarters. Then we’re going to take them to the sink and wash them. So spanopita is also a dish that’s like really great for using old things, old herbs, things that are like have seen better days. So it’s all getting cooked down. That’s another thing. There’s going to be some Greek coming at me in the comments that you have to cook this down beforehand. You absolutely do not. It’s a type of dish that Greeks refer to as pitha, which is not related to pita bread, but you can put various fillings inside. All right, leak. One leak. Two lbs of spinach. Measure with your heart. Parsley. You need a lot. Probably like a whole bunch. Don’t be precious about it. All right. Bunch of parsley, dill. We’re going to get some black pepper, olive oil, Greek olive oil. I’ve got a scale here and a bowl. Scales are your friend when you cook. We’re going to do one pound of feta cheese. And this is like legit right here, right out of the brine. It’s actually one lb 1 oz. So, that goes to show you no big deal. Let’s talk about feta cheese for a minute. Greek feta cheese is um typically always made from sheep’s or goats milk, whereas French and Bulgarian fetas are made from cow’s milk. and they just don’t have the same flavor profile that you’re really looking for. You know, it’s like tangy and creamy and salty. There’s different textures for different fetas. Some are crumblier, some are creamier, some are saltier, some are not. Where I buy my feta cheese, it’s a Greek specialty food store, which I’m lucky enough to live close by to. So, they pack it for me. They have it in their refrigerator already in brine. They cut it, pack it, and brine for me, and that’s how I get it. I just tell them how much I want. uh it’s typically categorized by like region that it comes from. Now, these are feta cheeses that you can typically find in various supermarkets. They’re all really good and they all have different flavor profiles, but one thing they all have in common is this little label right here. And what it says basically is protected designation of origin. So, you know that it comes from Greece and it’s a Greek feta cheese. All right. One pound of riot. Listen, this is like good fresh riot. If you can’t find this, just get, you know, whatever you can find in the store. One pound of riot. I would just lick this normally, but then somebody would be like, “Oh, you licked it and you put your fingers in it.” My secret ingredient, cream cheese. Just going to take half and not worry about it. Okay. And here’s going to be the fun part now. All right, three eggs. Always crack your eggs into a separate container because trying to get a shell out of here is going to be a nightmare. Eggs, cream cheese, or gota. And this is why I don’t cook it down because I do it with my hands. Just squeeze the life out of everything. So, we didn’t add the feta cheese yet because you don’t want the feta cheese to be like indistinguishable in it. You want like variation in size of pieces in the feta cheese. So, we’re going to crumble the feta cheese in after. Smells freaking delicious. So, we got it all mushed up about half the volume. You can see we’re just going to take the feta cheese and just crumble it in like this. So, you want some variation in pieces. I mean, obviously, you don’t want to throw this whole thing in there, but if there’s different size chunks, that’s what you want. Now we’re just going to toss. Pretty easy for building. You’ll need olive oil, fileo dough, and your filling. Don’t be scared of filo dough. Everybody’s like, “It’s going to dry out. It’s going to ruin your life.” It’s not. If you work fast enough, which you should be able to, it’s going to be totally fine. It’s okay. Don’t freak out. You know what? That’s like the best piece of advice I could probably give anyone for cooking. I think it’s going to be fine. Just chill out, man. Don’t freak out. To start, you’re going to think I’m insane, but we’re going to need like probably a/4 to a/3 of a cup of oil on the bottom. Trust me. I mean, like, this is a dish where your highlight is going to be feta cheese and olive oil. So, you want to use good olive oil. Don’t listen to anybody who tells you you shouldn’t cook with extra virgin olive oil. They’re a damn liar. Okay? We’re not going to eat the plastic. It’s like stupid simple. People are so scared of things like this. Now we drizzle. This is it. You just drizzle olive oil in between the layers. You don’t really want to brush it. You want to drizzle it cuz it’s going to create variation in the crust, crackle, crisp, whatever the heck you want to call it. We’re going to go this way. Going to go this way. And we’ll overlap just a little bit. And then we want to drizzle where our other layer is going to overlap here. And listen, dude, when you cook, you’re going to make a mess. I mean, just clean it up after. Let’s do this for camera here. What we’re doing here, just pile it. Oh my god, this smells incredible, too. Just get it up into the corners there. You don’t want to like don’t kill it. Don’t don’t don’t smush the life out of it. Now, you want it to be a little bit light and airy. So, you don’t want to like don’t mangle it. Don’t press down like a like a like a steam roller. You know what I’m saying? Give it a Don’t worry if it sits above the edge of the pan. Everything will shrink down as it cooks. Before I open this up, what we’re going to do is we’re going to take all these edges here. We’re going to fold them over the best we can. If you get a little too much bunching up, you can tear a little piece off. No big deal. Nothing’s going to happen. If it rips, just get rid of it. Everything is going to be okay. fold it over the edges. Now, we’re going to drizzle a little olive oil here on these pieces cuz again, we’re going to start building on top. And you want to drizzle olive oil between the layers, the filo dough. Over here, we’re also going to brush on the edges. Let that olive oil kind of soak down the edges, right? And you’ll see why in a minute for doing this. Oh, by the way, I should have mentioned my oven is preheating on bake at 350. We’re going to bake it on 350 for about an hour and a half on the lowest rack. When you bake on the lowest rack on bake, the lower heating element will heat the bottom of the pan and crisp the bottom of the pitha. All right, right across. Boom. Here is going to be the hardest part of this whole thing. Right. So, we have this little silicone spatula because we’re going to take these edges and we’re going to tuck them in. And we’re going to take the spatula, just grease it up with a little of that beautiful Greek olive oil. If you don’t dip the spatula in the oil, you’re going to regret it. Okay. Drizzle [Music] We’re going to do a little like crinkle top action. And also on this part, you could do a little bit of brushing. All right, we take this. We’re going to do this. Sprinkle it up. And we’re going to like kind of just wrinkly fold it on there. See? It’s going to be delicious. So, we’re going to score this before it goes in the oven. This is where you can decide how big you want the pieces to be. So, we’re going to go half here. You want to use a serrated knife for this because it’s really just the best to get through all of the stuff in there. and use like a sawing motion. That’s it. So, I’m not cutting all the way through to the bottom. All right. Just like this. We’re making some big hefty pieces today. Straight through, guys. All right. All the way to the bottom, but not through the bottom. Just really focusing on getting through the top. Now, this is the sensible thing of the two things we’re going to do. These are enormous pieces. They’re going to be fantastic. The insane thing that I’m going to do is I’m going to sprinkle water on top of this. Trust me on this. If you don’t sprinkle the water, it’s not going to be the same. I don’t know why it works. I’m not a food scientist, but if you are a food scientist, please tell me down below in the comments why this works. I’m sure there’ll be a plenty of internet food scientists who are going to tell me why this works. That was probably two tablespoons of water or so. And then the last thing I do, completely optional, is sprinkle sesame seeds on the top. Totally unnecessary. You don’t need to do this. If you don’t like sesame seeds, if you are allergic to sesame, you don’t want to do it, don’t do it. And now going to go in the oven. So again, this is going to go on the bottom rack in a 350°ree oven set on bake. It’s going to go in for about an hour and a half. We’re going to rotate it at 45 minutes. [Music] Bye-bye. So, we’ve been in the oven for 90 minutes. It’s about to come out. I rotated it at 45 minutes, halfway. Let’s see. So, this is like one of those things right now where I could look at it and be like, I’m going to leave it in an extra 10 minutes or 15 minutes or half an hour if I really wanted to. So, this is super hot. Obviously, don’t go doing anything dumb and grabbing the pan. So, now I’m going to cut through all the way to the bottom. Yeah, that’s crispy. I knew I wouldn’t it up. [Music] Moment of truth. M. Oh man, that’s perfect. Crispy top and bottom, flaky, salty, feta cheese, the herbs. Amazing. So, uh, check the description down below for the full recipe. There’s also a link and a 15% off code for Greek Food Emporium where I get my Greek goods. They do ship nationwide. If you like this video, hit the like button, click subscribe, notification bell, all that crap the YouTube guys say. And if you didn’t like this video, just leave or leave me a comment down below and I’ll fight you on it. I will. I don’t care. I love arguing on the internet and I’ll tell you all the reasons that you’re wrong. See you next time, guys.