Home | Food & Drink | Greek |

Greek Recipes - How to Make Spanakopita

Greek Recipes - How to Prepare Spinach for a Spanakopita Pie

To properly view this site, javascript must be enabled and Flash version 9 or higher must be installed.
Get the latest Flash player

All Segments in this Video
All Videos by this Expert

Greek Recipes - Make Spanakopita (Greek Spinach Pie)

View Comments (Add Comment)

Learn More

How to Blanch and Shock Asparagus
How to Blanch and Shock Pasta
How to Make Orecchiette Pasta Dough
Softball Fielding Skills - Ready Positions and Approaches

In this video series, professional softball instructor and coach Suzy Willemssen describes a number of basic skills required to play fastpitch softball.
How to Make Grilled Asparagus

In this video, Chef Bryan Davis shows you how to make delicious grilled asparagus.
How to Treat a Victim in Shock

This video will show many essential skills, such as how to splint a broken arm, stop a bloody nose, treat a shock victim and other life-saving first aid techniques.
What is sticker shock as it relates to colleges?

In this video, Mr.
Are there other symptoms that serve as signals that someone is about to go into anaphylactic shock?
How to Treat a Victim Having a Seizure

This video will show many essential skills, such as how to splint a broken arm, stop a bloody nose, treat a shock victim and other life-saving first aid techniques.
Basic First Aid Skills

Learn the skills necessary to help out a friend in need, or save someone's life.

Expert
Video Details
Recipe
Transcript

In March 2007, Chef Mike Isabella was appointed as head chef of the popular Penn Quarter restaurant Zaytinya, located at 701 9th Street, NW. THINKfoodGROUP’s José Andrés and Rob Wilder were pleased to welcome Chef Isabella who came to Washington with an extensive list of restaurant experience. Mike earned an associates degree in culinary arts at the New York Restaurant School and has several years of industry experience including three years working for Stephen Starr's Philadelphia restaurants. He worked as executive sous chef with James Beard Award-winning Chef Marcus Samuelsson at Washington Square, and as a sous chef at El Vez and Alma de Cuba, the modern Latin restaurant which received accolades from Conde’ Nast Traveler as one of the “Top 50 Restaurants.” Most recently Mike was chef de cuisine at Kyma, the award-winning Greek seafood restaurant in the exclusive Buckhead neighborhood of Atlanta. Zaytinya serves an extensive array of various hot and cold mezze “little dishes” reflecting the rich regional diversity of classical and contemporary Greek, Turkish and Lebanese cuisine. Open seven days a week. Zaytinya is located at 701 9th St., NW, in the heart of the Penn Quarter. For additional information call (202) 638-0800.

Greek Recipes - How to Prepare Spinach for a Spanakopita Pie

In this video, Chef Mike Isabella from Zaytinya restaurant in Washington, D.C. will instruct on how to prepare and bake the traditional Greek spinach pie called Spanokopita. This video is designed for someone interested in learning a traditional Greek dish, but includes a variety of tips and processes that are useful to any style cooking. This video series includes an overview of the process; cleaning, blanching and shocking spinach; preparing and sautéing leeks and scallions; clarifying butter; how to work with phyllo and how to build and bake the actual spanokopita.

This series: 71,679 views

Download to Mobile Device

Tags:

Spanokopita

Blanch

Shock

Greek

Pie

Spinach

Feta

Comments:

0 (Read Comments) (Add Comment)

Greek Recipes - How to Prepare Spinach for a Spanakopita Pie

Ingredients

1 Box of Country Phyllo dough
1 Pound of Spinach (pre-washed and cleaned)
1/2 Pound of Feta Cheese
7 Scallions
2 Tablespoons Fresh Parsley
2 Tablespoons Fresh Dill
1 Large Leek
2 Sticks of Butter (1/2 lb)
1 Egg

1 Tablespoon Mint (optional)

Instructions

1. Remove bruised leaves and stems of spinach. Wash and rinse the spinach leaves in cold water. Boil a pot of water and add a bit of salt. Drop the spinach leaves in for 10-15 seconds until wilted. Take spinach out with a strainer and dip them into ice water to stop the cooking process. Remove the spinach from the ice water and squeeze it out. Put it on a cutting board and chop.

2. Clean one large leek. Discard the bottom of the leek, the roots. Cut the top off the leek and discard it. Cut the remaining leek core halfway through and let it soak in cold water for a minute or two to clean. Remove it from the water and cut it in half completely. Now, cut into thin round half-moon shapes.

3. Cut the green part of the scallions into similar sizes, about a quarter inch thick.

4. Heat an 8 inch sauté pan with a tablespoon of oil at a low temperature. Sauté the leeks at a low temperature until they are tender (about 6 minutes). Then add the scallions to the pan and wilt (2 minutes). Take out of the pan and let cool at room temperature or in the refrigerator.

5. How to Clarify Butter: Chop 2 sticks of butter into little cubes. Put the butter in a pan and put it on the stove at high heat. When it comes to a boil, lower the heat and keep it at a high simmer. Use a fine mesh strainer or cheese cloth over a bowl and pour the butter into it slowly, skimming off the fat. Keep at room temperature.

6. Get a box of country style Phyllo dough. Remove the dough from the box. Remove Parchment paper. Be very careful with the Phyllo. Lay out evenly on a cutting board horizontally. Cut the dough in half and then in half again to create 14 pieces of Phyllo (which makes 14 triangles). Make sure the Phyllo edges are straight by cutting off raw edges. Store any leftovers in the freezer.

7. Combine the spinach, scallions, leeks, parsley, dill and feta cheese in a large bowl. Add an egg and mix together.

8. Brush the clarified butter onto the Phyllo dough strips to moisten. Add a tablespoon of filling 1/2 inch from the bottom of the dough and flatten. Fold dough into triangles like an American flag. Add more butter at the end of the Phyllo and seal tightly.

9. Put the pies on a baking tray lined with parchment paper. Brush a small amount of butter on top of the triangle. Refrigerate for at least a half an hour (up to overnight) to seal. Cook in the oven for 6 minutes at 350 degrees. After 6 minutes turn over and cook for another 2 minutes until they're golden brown on both sides. Brush with a bit more butter and serve.

Transcripts

Mike Isabella: How youre doing? My name is Mike Isabella; I am the Chef of the Zaytinya restaurant in Washington DC. Today, we will be making spanakopita, a traditional Greek pie, made with spinach and feta cheese, wrapped with Phyllo dough and baked off. Right now, I am going start you off by showing you how blanch and chop the spinach to get it ready for the pie.

Here is some spinach that I got for us today. This is a regular spinach, so you can buy at the store. I buy mine prewashed and cleaned. Sometimes if you get spinach, its going to be a little bit dirty and gritty and have stems on it, so what I do is I usually like to kind of go through the spinach and pick off some of the stems on the spinach leaves and also go through to see if there is any bruise leaves that are in fresh and ripe and well then Ill take those out, discard those leaves, when they are all torn up, but beside that we are going to go pretty much as pick through these leaves. Once we are done picking through the leaves, we are going to wash and rinse the spinach leaves off in some cold water. Once we pick through the leaves and rinse everything off, we can blanch and chop our spinach. Now, today for the blanching part we are going to get a pot of boiling water with a little salt in it. Bring it to a boil and drop the spinach leaves in it for about 10-15 seconds, so they wilt and they hold their nice, strong, rich green color, basically a thing that I would like to tell a customer is that you want to ever cover a pot that has -- that you are cooking a vegetable because what it does is, it takes the oxygen away and it makes it brown. So, we are going to keep it open. Slowly cooking, should be almost there. See the bubble still coming up, so there is small boil going, and thats it. Then were going to pull them out with a spider. Pull them out, well dip them right into iced water, which is called shocking it, we are going to shock the vegetables to stop the cooking process. Once we get to that point, we will pull the spinach out of the cold iced water. So, we dont take too much flavor, extract any flavor from the spinach and then we are going to squeeze it out.

Now, obviously this is a big -- this is a lot of spinach, but its one pound of spinach and after we blanch and shock the spinach, one pound of spinach is going to be -- this small little amount right over here, after we squeeze it out from the iced water. After we have the spinach blanched, shocked and squeezed out, we are going to put it on our cutting board and we are going to chop it up, so well be ready to go right into our bowl and wait for all the products to be cooked off and ready. Basically the reason why I am chopping the spinach up is that when you make a spanakopita and you take a bite out of it, its not going to all come out -- all the filling that going to come out of the spanakopita in one bite. Were going little bites and you will be able to enjoy the spanakopita, instead of just one bite, multiple bites.

Thats how we prepare the blanching and shocking of the spinach today. Next, well be showing you how to get ready on the leeks and scallions.

Greek Recipes - How to Prepare Spinach for a Spanakopita Pie

Greek Recipes - Make Spanakopita (Greek Spinach Pie)