SPANAKOPITA

What’s inside?

A green abyss of spinach and feta that you’d love to fall into. The filling is traditionally made with spinach, feta, dill and eggs - but it’s often made vegan during the Greek fasting periods where animal products are avoided (uh, apart from fish which are considered a plant in Greece when it comes to fasting). But the beauty of this greens pie is that you can use whatever greens get you hot under the collar or are just lounging around your crisper and begging to be used up.

In addition to spinach, I like to use up leeks, kale, silverbeet, cauliflower greens, green beans and swiss chard to bulk out the greens portion of the filling. You should definitely still include spinach within the mix to qualify the ‘spanaki’ part of ‘spanakopita’. Either frozen or fresh spinach is fine but the key is to remove all the moisture from the greens before adding them. That means salting and squeezing fresh spinach, vigorously draining defrosted frozen spinach or pre-cooking leeks, kale, silverbeet, cauliflower greens, green beans or swiss chard. Skip this step and you’ll find all that moisture will release while the pie bakes and ruin your chance of crispy phyllo or a set filling.

On dill: a proper bunch of dill is huge, so if your local supermarket tries to pass off a measly shrub as a whole bunch, use two or three for this recipe, as dill is our star flavour!

How is it made vegan?

Greek cooking already naturally flirts with veganism through nistisima – food for Lent made without animal products. You can walk through a Greek supermarket and find dairy free cheeses and pies, all made for the fasting period. So you’ll need to track down vegan feta for this recipe (in Australia, they’re available at vegan supermarkets, greek supermarkets and all major supermarkets).

My Great Aunty Anne and Great Aunty Theresa sat down over a cup of tea one day with me to debate the best way to veganise a spanakopita filling. Cooked rice! I’d never thought of it before. It’s brilliant! A great way to use leftovers, the rice naturally thickens the filling and because vegan cheese can be oil based - it helps drink up the feta and lemon juice flavour while giving the firmness a traditional feta and egg filling would. I also add in a little chickpea flour to help increase the binding in the filling.

Phyllo/filo pastry should pretty much always be vegan and if you can somehow find one that is made with butter and not oil.. then they screwed up, you filo me? The fat used is olive oil so the remainder of this recipe is naturally vegan anyhow.

What form to make it in?

Spanakopita is wonderfully versatile and from a shaping perspective is pretty hard to fuck up. Make it as a pie, roll, swirl or triangle. For the love of Zeus, just make it! In Australia, I recommend using refrigerated Antoniou brand filo pastry for best results. Otherwise, classic frozen phyllo after an overnight fridge defrost is great. Here’s a few ways I do it..

As a large classic pie, scored into slices before baking like in Vegan Junk Food’s Spanakopita. You can leave the tops naked, or crumple up any remaining pastry to sit atop the slices to make a textural topping:

Use a pastry brush to cover the base of the lined baking tray with olive oil, then line the tray with three sheets of filo. Brush a little more oil over the pastry and place two sheets of filo next to each other on top (the ends will hang over the edges of the tray). Rotate the tray 90 degrees and repeat with another two sheets of filo. Keep going until you’ve used eight sheets of filo in total.

Spoon the filling into the baking tray and use a spatula to spread until flat and smooth. Fold the overhanging filo sheets over the mixture, drizzling and brushing the pastry with a little more oil as you go. Place two more sheets of filo over one half of the filling, then brush with oil and tuck the ends under the filled bottom of the pastry. Repeat with two more filo sheets on the other side.

Loosely crumple the remaining filo sheets to create as much texture as possible and position the sheets on top of each portion. Brush the remaining oil over the top before baking.

As a crinkle spanakopita:

Preheat the oven to 180c FF. Use a pastry brush to cover the base of the lined baking tray with olive oil. Fold a sheet of phyllo ‘accordion style’ by folding it back and forth until you make a thin strip. Repeat until you’ve used half the packet, then spread these across the bottom of the tray side-by-side to fill the whole thing. Shuffle them around so they fill the whole thing then brush the phyllo with olive oil. Blind bake for about 10 minutes until the pastry firms up.

Spread the majority of the filling over the top then repeat the crinkle step with the remaining pastry. Begin from one side and fill the tray in a swirling pattern, shuffling the crinkles around to make texture. Dollop the remaining filling into any major gaps around the top, pressing it in to give the appearance that it’s bubbling out of the spanakopita. Brush the top heartily with olive oil before baking.

As a spiral spanakopita:

Use a pastry brush to cover your biggest baking tray lightly with olive oil. On a bench top, lay three sheets of filo on top of each other, long ends facing you. Generously splatter and brush oil over the top pastry sheet.

Spoon a generously heaped strip of filling along the long end of the filo sheets, aiming for an even tube around 3.5 cm (11⁄2 in) thick. Not too tightly, roll the filling up to form a long cylinder. Coil the pastry into a spiral.

Either repeat the above step to create individual coiled portions, or place the first swirl in the centre of the baking tray and coil more filled pastry portions around the first swirl to create a large, grand spanakopita. Evenly brush the remaining oil over the top before baking.