(bright music)
- Spanikopita is a dish
that doesn't have that many ingredients,
so each one of the ingredients
gets prepared very thoughtfully.
The basis of Spanikopita is spinach.
So don't turn your nose up at this.
Spinach is really good.
The problem with spinach
is kind of like the problem with beets,
or I don't know, maybe Brussels sprouts.
If you don't have a great first experience,
pretty much scarred for life.
If you're using frozen vegetables,
then all you need is one box of frozen spinach
or one bag of frozen spinach.
If you're using fresh spinach,
use four bunches of spinach
because they cook down to almost nothing.
If you have frozen spinach, what you want to do
is get as much water out of it as possible.
There's actually a lot of water in frozen spinach.
So you're going to let it thaw.
And you're going to continuously try to wring it out.
Either take a kitchen towel like this,
a clean kitchen towel, lay it out, put the spinach in it,
close it up, and honestly, wring it out like a towel.
And a lot of water will come out.
Or what you can do is use a bunch of paper towels.
That also works as well.
You want to kind of just scrape some of the spinach off,
but that's totally fine.
Put that wrung out, dried out spinach into a bowl.
If you're going to cook fresh spinach, which is what we did,
is you put your fresh spinach into a pan
with a little bit of olive oil.
Start to warm it up, it'll start to wilt down.
Put some fresh garlic in there,
and also put in maybe a little bit of onion if you like.
We didn't do that with this one.
What we ended up doing is keeping them separate
just so we could do it all together.
So take your spinach,
go ahead and put it into a mixing bowl.
Then comes the fun part.
You get to start sort of dressing it up and seasoning it.
I'm going to add about three cloves of garlic.
You can never have too much garlic, in my opinion.
Don't do this on a date, but I love the garlic.
Then, fresh parsley.
If you don't have fresh parsley, that's okay.
You can also use some dried parsley.
And I would say you probably want to put in
about four teaspoons,
like a tablespoon and a teaspoon works as well.
Then comes the fresh dill.
Oh, it's so lovely.
And again, do I would say about a tablespoon of fresh dill.
And if you are using dried dill,
you can use a little bit less than that.
And then comes the salt.
You don't need to use too much salt.
I would say probably put about half a teaspoon of salt in,
because what we're also going to do is put in some feta.
The last ingredient are our scallions, our green onions.
And when you're cutting them,
make sure you cut them relatively thin.
No one wants to bite into a large piece of scallion.
And what's love about this as well
is you can use both the white parts of the scallion
and the green parts.
So you're not wasting anything.
And so take three scallions and chop them up
and go ahead and add those as well.
Mix this together.
And you'll see it's just a lot of different,
beautiful types of green.
The next thing is you want to create a binder.
So remember, we're always trying to find glue.
We're trying to find something
that's going to keep things together.
And the binder in spanikopita is egg.
So take one egg, break it,
put it into a separate bowl,
'cause you want to sort of beat it up a little bit
before you put it into your spinach.
(fork whisking)
So once you've beaten that,
going to add that in.
And using a fork, mix it into the spinach.
So you can see now it's becoming
a little bit more manageable,
'cause when we start filling up our rough puff,
we we want to make sure that it's a consistency
that's going to stick inside.
My favorite ingredient is feta.
So I am using here about four ounces,
so a quarter of a pound of feta.
And so feta you can either buy in crumbles
or you can buy it in in sort of blocks or pieces.
It's really a matter of preference,
if you want to be super efficient,
just get the crumbles and dump them right in.
If you want to have a little snack for later,
use these pieces.
You can make these pieces relatively big.
They're going to melt down a little bit,
but you don't have to sort of be fussed about big or small.
So once you've done that,
give your mix just one other good swish
just to make sure everything is evenly distributed.
You're going to be putting these into multiple pockets.
So you want to, again, remember,
you don't don't want to be the sad person
that doesn't get any feta.
Okay, great.
So now that we have the mix,
we're going to roll out our dough, cut it into pieces,
and make them into folds.
The first thing that I want to do is square it off.
If it looks almost straight on one edge,
you can just kind of like push it in a little bit.
But if you have a little bit of hanging over pieces,
just square them so that you can increase the likelihood
that you're going to have straight lines.
We're going to put nine squares here.
So I'm just going to eye it, because sometimes the ruler
is just about as good as your eye, and I'm going to score it.
And scoring simply means you're just
putting a really light line on top of the surface
to give you in a direction of where you need to go
when you're actually cutting.
So to just makes it a little bit easier long term.
And also, if you score it and it's not straight,
you haven't committed to a cut.
So you can always go back and change it a little bit.
What's that phrase?
Measure twice, cut once.
it's a good one.
(upbeat music)
This is a sizing that I just chose,
and it's honestly arbitrary.
So if you decide you want something bigger,
you can do something larger.
If you decide you want to do something smaller,
I might caution against going too much smaller,
'cause you remember you want to have a nice ratio
of dough to filling.
The next thing, once we have all of our pastry cut
is to do a glue.
So take the egg wash,
clean silicone brush, and put some glue onto it.
So you're taking the egg wash,
which is one egg with about a tablespoon of water.
Again, you can use dairy if you'd like,
you can put a little heavy cream in there as well
instead of the water.
It's really a matter of reference.
I like using water 'cause it thins it out a little bit
and it just makes it easier.
You're not looking for a really thick layer here.
You're just really looking for something
that's going to sort of encourage the dough to seal to itself.
The next step is to put the filling on top
of each one of the squares.
Because we're going to fold them in half,
because we're going to make little triangles out of them,
you want to make sure that you only fill half
of each one of your little squares.
So you're going to put it kind of in one area like that.
Take your square and you want to fold it into a triangle.
So take the end that doesn't have the filling,
and you want to pull it up and then slowly seal it.
So you can see that I was a little bit ambitious
with how much filling I put in.
That's okay.
Just seal it.
If a little bit sticks out, we can pull it out later.
Or now.
You can also, which one of the things that I love to do,
is sort of seal it up and then make it into a pocket
and then pull, you can pull the dough.
Remember, your dough is very malleable
and it's very forgiving
and very are interested in making you happy.
So you've got the dough, you've got it sealed up.
And then another way to seal it is you want to take a fork
and actually just make a little bit of a border.
(upbeat music)
There we go.
So that's our first one.
We go into the next one.
Same thing.
This is a little bit less of a square,
a little more of a triangle.
I'm not mad about that.
'Cause all that means is
somebody gets a little bit more dough.
So remember, there's a lot of butter in this dough,
and with a lot of butter comes a lot of water,
because there's a lot of water in butter.
And the high temperature that we're cooking these
will cause all of that water to evaporate and make steam.
And that's how you get your layers.
But if you don't give it a steam escape,
like a little slit of some kind,
then it's all going to kind of like cook inside
and it's going to be kind of watery.
and a little bit unhappy.
So the goal is your food should be very happy.
And for it to be happy, we need to give it a steam escape.
Take a sheet tray prepared with a piece of parchment paper,
or with a Silpat,
depending on what you have or what you prefer.
I love the idea of having reusable things in the kitchen.
We go through so much paper and plastic in our lives.
If there's any way that we can reduce that,
we need to try to.
Give the edges one more quick seal
if they're trying to make a run for it.
And then once you've done that,
egg wash.
This is just going to go very lightly across the top.
And then we are going to make the steam escape.
Take a sharp knife when you do that,
because remember this is a dough
that's going to be a little bit soft at this point
because we've been working with it for a while,
and just give it a quick little incision.
(upbeat music)
It doesn't have to be too big.
If you want, you can also make a design.
You can make a little X or something like that,
if you prefer.
And then the final step is,
remember we're seasoning every layer,
just a tiny little bit of fleur de sel.
This is really more for effect than anything else.
Remember, it's not going to melt, which I love.
And it's going to give you a couple little crispy kernels
of crunch and sort of brightness
when you're biting into the spanikopita.
Once they've been totally prepared, put them in the oven,
a 375 degree convection or 400 degrees regular oven
for anywhere from 25 to 30 minutes.
Keep an eye on them.
Again, everyone's oven is different.
You don't need to cook it for that long
for the internal temperature to be okay.
What you're really trying to do is get that puff
and get that beautiful golden brown color.
Just a pretty light golden brown,
like day one or day two of your vacation,
not like one weekend in the Bahamas.
Okay?
(happy music)
These are our spanakopita.
It's very warm.
You can see all these beautiful layers.
It's just so luxurious and beautiful and decadent.
It's just amazing.
The outside is just golden brown,
insides completely cooked through.
And you can see that that little steam escape,
that little steam slit, has done its job.
All right. (dough crunching)
Can you hear that?
That's like shattery,
it almost sounds like when you eat a croissant.
It's just that beautiful shattery texture.
The bottom's a little bit crispy.
Ugh, can't wait.
Mm.
So good.
Really bright.
Sometimes you think it's going to be really buttery
because of the dough, but it's not.
It's just the perfect casing
for all of the spinach and deliciousness.
I promise you,
if you don't love spinach, make this, I will convert you.
(bright music)
You did it.
Now I want to see what you made.
Join me in my brand new class on Skillshare.
Click the link below.
I can't wait to see you there.