Spanakopita. /span uh KO pe ta/ You've heard of it. It sounds like a high calorie, high fat, special occasion festival food. Perhaps, if you are not Greek, it is just that. That's how I thought of it, until last Friday when it was the subject of a cooking lesson with my beloved Greek cooking teacher, Evdoxia. With her generous heart and enormous Greek extended family, it seems she can only make recipes that serve 50 or more, and she loves to use oil and butter lavishly. So the recipe is not exactly translatable into health-conscious family-style dining. But the lessons learned were invaluable and totally transferable.
The day's chatter was full of tips and tricks, suggestions for substitutions and modifications. With each step and each layer of filo, she'd say things like, "Thea So-and-So makes it like this," or "Mrs. So-and-So adds this and instead of that." Evdoxia makes it the way she makes it because of her family traditions, the regional customs where she grew up, and the instruction of many older and Greek-er ladies that moved in and out of her 80 plus years. Layer upon layer of filo and culinary influences makes her spanakopita, or spinach pita as she calls it, the best. Reputedly the best that anyone, Greek or not, has ever eaten.
Pita means pie. Pie can be stuffed with many different things. In her spinach pie, she uses spinach, of course. But that is because spinach is available everywhere in all seasons thanks to the frozen foods section. But she also makes with it Swiss chard, which thrives in her garden well into the freezing temperatures of winter. In the summer, she loves to use vleeta. Any leafy green will work, it seems, except the bitter ones like dandelion greens. In my mind, this means spanakopita just took up residence in the use whatever is in the fridge drawer of my mental food card catalog. Frozen spinach, however, she says, is the easiest and most common, though definitely not the tastiest. And, for whatever reason I don't care to explore, she feels that the generic grocery store brand of fresh spinach ends up tasting better than the more expensive brand names or organic.
Over the past five or so years of cooking with Evdoxia, I've learned that her recipes are difficult to adapt or divide for a number of reasons. The first reason and most insurmountable reason her most of here recipes are hard to scale down to normal proportions is that the ingredient amounts are tailored to fit a certain pan which no store sells. Like her baklava pan. It was hand made a100 years ago in the village where she was born. It is so integral to her cooking life that when it was time for a new stove, she took the pan to the appliance store to make sure it fit into any prospective new oven. And when her sons buy new ovens, they take the pan to the appliance store, lest their mother not be able to cook in their kitchens.
For her spanakopita recipe she uses a 18-inch round pan. You could make this using with two 9 x 13 cake pans, but it would be harder to cut into the perfectly sized diamonds that present the serving the way they should look. Otherwise, cutting it into squares like lasagna, would be like .. well ... cutting it into squares like lasagna and that's just not right. Presentation is important. So I would opt for making it in the biggest round layer cake pans that you can find. And then follow Evdoxia's suggestion for leftover ingredients. She always has a suggestion even it if it is just "roll it up and bake it like a strudel." A Greek strudel, that is.
So here are two recipes: One from Evdoxia's kitchen and one scaled down for your table. Let me know what you think of my adaptations.
The day's chatter was full of tips and tricks, suggestions for substitutions and modifications. With each step and each layer of filo, she'd say things like, "Thea So-and-So makes it like this," or "Mrs. So-and-So adds this and instead of that." Evdoxia makes it the way she makes it because of her family traditions, the regional customs where she grew up, and the instruction of many older and Greek-er ladies that moved in and out of her 80 plus years. Layer upon layer of filo and culinary influences makes her spanakopita, or spinach pita as she calls it, the best. Reputedly the best that anyone, Greek or not, has ever eaten.
Pita means pie. Pie can be stuffed with many different things. In her spinach pie, she uses spinach, of course. But that is because spinach is available everywhere in all seasons thanks to the frozen foods section. But she also makes with it Swiss chard, which thrives in her garden well into the freezing temperatures of winter. In the summer, she loves to use vleeta. Any leafy green will work, it seems, except the bitter ones like dandelion greens. In my mind, this means spanakopita just took up residence in the use whatever is in the fridge drawer of my mental food card catalog. Frozen spinach, however, she says, is the easiest and most common, though definitely not the tastiest. And, for whatever reason I don't care to explore, she feels that the generic grocery store brand of fresh spinach ends up tasting better than the more expensive brand names or organic.
Over the past five or so years of cooking with Evdoxia, I've learned that her recipes are difficult to adapt or divide for a number of reasons. The first reason and most insurmountable reason her most of here recipes are hard to scale down to normal proportions is that the ingredient amounts are tailored to fit a certain pan which no store sells. Like her baklava pan. It was hand made a100 years ago in the village where she was born. It is so integral to her cooking life that when it was time for a new stove, she took the pan to the appliance store to make sure it fit into any prospective new oven. And when her sons buy new ovens, they take the pan to the appliance store, lest their mother not be able to cook in their kitchens.
For her spanakopita recipe she uses a 18-inch round pan. You could make this using with two 9 x 13 cake pans, but it would be harder to cut into the perfectly sized diamonds that present the serving the way they should look. Otherwise, cutting it into squares like lasagna, would be like .. well ... cutting it into squares like lasagna and that's just not right. Presentation is important. So I would opt for making it in the biggest round layer cake pans that you can find. And then follow Evdoxia's suggestion for leftover ingredients. She always has a suggestion even it if it is just "roll it up and bake it like a strudel." A Greek strudel, that is.
So here are two recipes: One from Evdoxia's kitchen and one scaled down for your table. Let me know what you think of my adaptations.
What a cool webpage!
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