Spanakopita Anyone?
April 8th 2009 05:47
My grandfather was a Greek migrant who married my grandmother, an Australian girl from the country, back in the 1920s. Over the course of their lives together my grandfather taught my grandmother to cook a number of Greek dishes, one of which was spanakopita. (George Colombaris would be impressed with my grandmother’s ability to cook Greek food with as much, if not more than the proficiency of the Greeks themselves.) When I was growing up, about once a fortnight, my grandparents would bring my family (and the families of my aunt and uncle) a spanakopita each. It would arrive in a thin cardboard box protected lovingly by a brown paper bag. As mundane as that sounds, it isn’t – my grandmother rolled the filo pastry for each of those pies with a curtain rod, painstakingly painting each layer with melted butter and olive oil. She would have spent the entire day baking, and she must have made at least 6 layers of pastry per pie. My family and I would rejoice each time we had the pleasure of eating it. There would always be a fight over the final pieces and who in the family ate the most.
Fast-forward twenty years and I have been craving my Nana’s spanakopita. I have ordered it in many Greek restaurants over time, but all I have experienced is disappointment at the bought pastry used, the dull flavours in the pie mixture and the loveless manner of its making.
So recently I set out on an Internet quest to find a filo pastry recipe to make this pie. Finding a recipe for homemade filo has been no mean feat as people do not seem to like making anything from scratch these days. Having found one, I set about making the pie on a rainy Saturday morning, my great experiment, with little idea of what I should expect as the result. I didn’t know whether the quantities for the pastry would work, how the pie mixture would taste, given the recommendation was to lace it with “Greek” herbs, something my grandmother never did. So I made the recipe as I felt it should be made, along with the pastry. Happily I can report I reproduced the taste and smell of this marvellous comfort food, and an added bonus is it keeps my grandmother’s memory alive.
I’d be interested to hear what recipes people have for spanakopita. I use silverbeet in mine, but spinach is supposed to be the staple here – at some point I’ll give this a go, but the mainstay of my recipe is leeks. Nothing beats its flavour in combination with the feta, in my opinion, until someone tells me otherwise! So, George, Greek chefs far and wide, what are your experiences of spanakopita? Thoughts? Recipes? Anyone, ANYONE?
Fast-forward twenty years and I have been craving my Nana’s spanakopita. I have ordered it in many Greek restaurants over time, but all I have experienced is disappointment at the bought pastry used, the dull flavours in the pie mixture and the loveless manner of its making.
So recently I set out on an Internet quest to find a filo pastry recipe to make this pie. Finding a recipe for homemade filo has been no mean feat as people do not seem to like making anything from scratch these days. Having found one, I set about making the pie on a rainy Saturday morning, my great experiment, with little idea of what I should expect as the result. I didn’t know whether the quantities for the pastry would work, how the pie mixture would taste, given the recommendation was to lace it with “Greek” herbs, something my grandmother never did. So I made the recipe as I felt it should be made, along with the pastry. Happily I can report I reproduced the taste and smell of this marvellous comfort food, and an added bonus is it keeps my grandmother’s memory alive.
I’d be interested to hear what recipes people have for spanakopita. I use silverbeet in mine, but spinach is supposed to be the staple here – at some point I’ll give this a go, but the mainstay of my recipe is leeks. Nothing beats its flavour in combination with the feta, in my opinion, until someone tells me otherwise! So, George, Greek chefs far and wide, what are your experiences of spanakopita? Thoughts? Recipes? Anyone, ANYONE?
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