Our Spanakopita is a savory spinach pie made with phyllo dough, spinach, and a blend of feta and ricotta cheese. It’s a wonderful meatless dish for lent or anytime. This recipe makes a lot, but good news: it’s great leftover!
Written recipe: bit.ly/marymacspanakopita
[Music] Hello and welcome to In the Kitchen with Mary Mac. Today we’re making spanicopa, which is Greek spinach pie. This is one of those recipes that is regionally popular. So all around the Mediterranean, there are variations of spanicopa. They all seem delicious. They’re all similar. I use a recipe that it may not be the most authentic version of spanicopa, but I would say it’s a pretty good version of spanicopa. I love to say spanicopa. Basically, it’s a spinach and feta and in this case, ricotta. I don’t know. It said it’s it’s called a pie, but it’s more like I don’t even know. It’s more like a sandwich sort of a thing. a little sandwich of all these yummy things mixed together and it’s in filo dough which is very interesting to work with if you’ve never worked with it. So I’ll talk a little bit about that too as we go along. I would definitely say when you get your file dough read the box several times. Read it really really well and try to remember everything that that box says because it will all come in handy when you’re yelling at the dough for breaking. You’ll be like, “Ah, said this would happen.” And you know, you need to feel it away in your memory. Yes. Felo it away into your memory. So, here we go. Now, this is, like I said, it’s uh felo dough is your crust. And then you’re going to have your filling. So, you’re going to want to get your filow dough ahead of time and put it in your refrigerator to thaw, which could take at least like 24 hours, I would say. So, you want to um if it’s in the freezer, put it in your refrigerator. And this is a kind of recipe that you need to make a plan if you’re making this. Okay. So, you need one bag of frozen chopped spinach. And the bags seem to vary in size these days. So, I would say I had a 12 oz bag that I used to make this the last time, but usually I get 16 oz bags of this. anywhere between 12 and 16 ounces of frozen chopped spinach. You’re going to want to thaw that completely and drain it really, really well. So, the easiest way to do that is get a colander and just open your bag of frozen spinach and dump it into the colander and let it thaw and drain. Um, you can cover your colander with a paper towel and just leave it set in your sink. This will take a little while, too. You’ll need 1 tbsp of dried parsley, 1 and 1/2 tspoon of dried minced onion, 2 tablespoon of minced garlic, um, which is about two cloves of garlic, or you can use the jarred type of garlic, or in a pinch, you can use a teaspoon of dry granulated garlic. You’ll need four large eggs, the most expensive part of this. You’ll need 6 to 8 ounces of crumbled feta cheese. And I bought a container of precrumbled feta cheese, which I did not know this item existed. Actually, I am not a huge feta fan. A huge fan. Boy, that’s hard to say. I am not a huge fan of feta. Um, so I I bought a 6 oz container of precrumbled feta cheese and then a 16 oz container of ricotta cheese. I’m usually a very big fan of dry ricotta, but I could not find it the last time when I was making this because I think it was off season, like it wasn’t Christmas or Easter or, you know, so I bought a container of I bought a plastic container, 16 oz container of ricotta cheese. And then I just kind of poured off some of the excess liquid that was in there. It wasn’t too bad. And then you’ll need a half teaspoon of salt. This is your filling right here. Now, you’re going to need about 3/4 cup of melted butter and a half cup of olive oil mixed together. And this is going to be what you’re going to brush on your felo sheets. You’ll need a pastry brush. And again, as I said, a 16oz package of Felo dough. Don’t bother preheating your oven yet because this takes a while. I This is one of those ones, like I say, you you might want to do this on a day when the weather’s not too good and you’re going to be home all day. This is a perfect recipe for something like that. Before you start to mix your filling up, you want to make sure that your spinach is very well drained. So, what I did, I had it in the colander draining, then I squeezed it out by hand in the colander, which is rather disgusting, but spinach just will it will just stick right together. So, just get a handful, squeeze it, and then leave that little pile there. Then get another handful and squeeze it. And then what I did after I’d made all these little fistfuls of squeezed spinach, I put them into a cotton towel and twisted it and squeezed it out some more. So, if you have like a nice smooth cotton towel, like a flower sack towel, that works really well. So once you’ve done that much squeezing, transfer your spinach into a large bowl and then break it up cuz it’s going to be very squished together. So break it up as much as you can. And then add your remaining filling ingredients to your spinach. Ricotta you’re going to want to break up a little bit as you dump it in there. Your feta cheese will just crumble out, you know, whatever. And you want to add those all together and mix well. So, I took like a big fork and just kind of kept turning them over and over and blending them well together so that it was pretty evenly mixed with the seasonings and everything. Set that aside. You want to get a large baking sheet to put your filo dough on. And I would say like a big jelly roll pan. And then what I did, I took a large cotton towel like you would use for like a jelly roll, something like that. like it’s a flower sack towel, but it’s big. But you could use two smaller towels if you need to. Just wet them a little bit so that they’re lightly damp. Like you don’t want them to be wet wet, but just damp. And you put one towel on the bottom, set the felo sheets on it, and then cover it with the other towel. And be I mean, this stuff is paper th No, it’s not even paper thin. This stuff is so thin, it’s ridiculous. I don’t even know how they make it this thin. I have no idea. I’m gonna have to look for a video how they make filo dough because it’s unbelievable how thin it is. So, you want to cover it because as soon as it gets dry, it breaks like immediately. And so, you have to have those damp towels. Just don’t make them wet. Just like I said, like barely damp, okay? And have that ready. So, what I did was I I did my filo dough and then right next to it, I put the pan that I was going to make the spanicopa in. So, you got your dough ready. Now, prepare a 9 by13 baking dish or a slightly larger one if you have one. I have this oddsized cake pan that’s like a half sheet pan. It’s weirdly large. So, that’s what I used and it’s like it’s probably like 12 by 16 and I think fo do sheets are like 20 by something maybe like 14 by 20 or something. If you’re using a 9 by13, you’re going to have some overhang, but don’t panic because it’ll all work out. What you want to do is take your pan and brush the bottom of it and the sides with your butter oil mixture. Line the bottom of the pan with two to three sheets of filow dough. Because what’s going to happen is it sticks together and you think you have one sheet, but you actually have four sheets. Be very careful. Pick up two if you can, three if you can’t get them separated and lay them in the pan so that they go up the sides and over the top of the pan. So, they’re going to be bigger than the pan so they’ll be, you know, some overhang. Brush that with your butter oil mixture all over. Lay two more sheets in and brush with the butter and oil. And you want to repeat this until you’ve used about 2/3 of the filow dough in your stack. So, you’ve got two sheets butter oil, two sheets butter oil, two sheets butter oil, and you keep doing this and layering it up and laying your dough over the sides of the pan. Now, once you’ve used about 2/3 of your sheets, you’re ready to put your filling in. So, very carefully, spread your filling evenly in the pan over your sheets of dough. You want to get it nice and level and even. Once you get all your filling in there, now you’re going to top with two more sheets of felo. Brush that with butter and oil. And then you’ve got all this felo hanging over the edges of your pan. Take about half of that and fold it in carefully over the filling. Not all of it, but only about half of it. This will help you at the end when you’re sealing everything up. Now, you’ve still got half your sheets laying out there. Good. Continue to lay sheets into the pan two at a time and brush with butter and oil until you’ve used up all the sheets. What I found was as I started to get towards the end, my sheets were breaking in half, falling off, doing everything. So, what I was doing was kind of like assembling them in there, which is fine. If you have to assemble broken pieces, absolutely fine. Brush those with your butter and oil and then put the next layer on. Once you’ve used up all your sheets or as many as you can possibly use because when I get to the bottom usually like the last couple you can’t even they’re just you know they’re waste. Okay. So once you get them all in there you take those edges and very carefully fold those down over and again brush those with the butter and oil. Seal them down good. You want to cover the whole top of that with the rest of the butter oil that you made. If you run out of butter oil, you can make a little bit more or you can like if it starts to get low, add more olive oil to it, you know, so you’ve got a good amount going to get to the finish. Your spanicopa is assembled. This is what you want to do next. You want to take a nice sharp knife and you want to cut through the spanicopa partway. You want to go down, not the whole way to the bottom of the pan, but maybe down about halfway, 2/ird of the way through because it’ll make it so much easier to slice after it’s baked if you do this because it gets very crispy on the top. Okay? So, you can either cut it into squares of equal sizes or diamonds like how if you’ve ever seen how baklava is cut, you can do it in diamonds. I did mine in like rectangles cuz my pan was my pan was so big. I don’t think that was the best idea, but I thought, eh, I’ll try it. Cut that into squares, not the whole way through or diamonds or whatever. Now, you can preheat your oven. So, preheat your oven to 325°. And you’re going to bake this for 1 hour or until the crust is crispy and golden. Now, if your crust doesn’t look as golden as you want, you can bake it for a little bit longer, but about an hour is perfect. And then when you take it out of the oven, you’re going to put it on a cooling rack and let it cool for a little while. And then cut through maybe about like 15 minutes or so. You can cut through the whole way and then let it finish cooling cuz it is pretty warm there. You can serve this warm. It should lift right out with a spatula. And this is really good served with a salad on the side. You You got a nice dinner there. It’s also a great It’s great to just eat by itself. And it reheats really well, so once it’s cooled off, you can take individual slices out and put them into containers and put them in your refrigerator. You can freeze it once it’s baked. It freezes really well and reheats really well. in an oven or a toaster oven. I wouldn’t microwave it because you want that filo dough to get nice and crispy again. This is a great recipe for Lent because it’s so much leftovers. You know, it serves a lot of people. It’s really good. And once you get through the labor of layering this whole thing out, it’s a breeze. It’s a breeze, but it’s really good. So, if you’ve never made spanicopa, I encourage you to give it a try. Even though everybody’s all wigging out about eggs right now, it’s well worth it. It’s well worth it. Make yourself a nice Easter spanicopa and enjoy it with a nice little salad and feel proud of yourself for managing to fight a package of filo dough. And make sure to check us out online on social media at Marymakbake House on our website at marymackbakehouse.com. And if you’d like a written version of this recipe or for any of our other podcast recipes, go to marymackbakehouse.com and click the recipes button for a full writtenout recipe blog with pictures. Thanks a lot for listening if you did, and if you didn’t, too bad for you.