1 leak (cut thinly and cleaned)
2 cups of spinach (chopped)
1/3 cup of cottage cheese
1/2 cup of good feta cheese (crumble yourself)
4 tbs of butter (melted)
2 eggs (whisked)
8 sheets of phyllo dough
Set your oven to 375 degrees, covering with aluminum foil when it’s golden
Grab the entire leak and lay it parallel to you on your workspace. You are then going to cut the bottom piece off, where all of the roots are sticking out. Leaks are a root vegetable, so that area that you are cutting off lived in the ground for quite a bit! Next, you are going to cut all of the leafy stalk off. In order to find the top of the usable stalk, find the leafy greens and look closely at when it goes from a pale white color to a grainy green texture. Cut where the grainy green texture starts gaining more of the green pigment.
Once you have your usable stalk, start slicing the stalk from the bottom to the top in thin slices. Once you have all of your thin slices, throw them into a bowl with some water and move them around with your hand. You may see some of the dirt left from its growing process in the bowl. Grab the leaks with your hand and pour the water out then grab a paper towel and smush them down to get as much of the water out as you can.
Chop your spinach in a rough chop, ensuring that there are no large whole pieces of spinach. Take your spinach, leak, egg, cottage cheese, and crumbled feta cheese, and toss it into your prep bowl. Give it a little stir and make sure everything is well mixed and incorporated.
Grab two sheets of phyllo dough (carefully). I will tell you that some of my phyllo dough was sticking and I considered throwing the whole thing across the room, but we made it past that blip and we’re better for it. Lay it down and put your mixture in a straight line towards the bottom of the dough. Then wet your hands a little bit and roll the phyllo dough and mixture all the way up, then carefully roll it into a spiral. I demonstrate this in my tiktok if you want to see how I do it. You’re going to get tears because you’re forcing a super fragile dough into a manipulated shape. Don’t let it get the best of you.
Then put them all on a sheet pan, douse with a little bit of butter and flakey salt (to feel fancy). Put it in the oven at 375 for 30 minutes. Once the top is golden, cover with aluminum foil.
Then, you’re ready to eat. From my ancestors to your family, enjoy!
Spanakopita is a traditional recipe originating in Greece. It is a spinach feta pie filled with a few key ingredients that produce it’s overall delicious texture and flaky phyllo “filo” crust. Sometimes this baked spanakopita recipe is created in greek cheese pie triangles though that is not how my yiayia did it. I do have family members that create it this way, but I find the phyllo dough ratio to spanakopita filling to be too much.
Good question. I think if you’re optimistic then it can definitely be healthy. The majority of the spanakopita nutritional ingredients are phyllo dough, spinach, eggs, and leaks. The leaks and the spinach are definitely healthy. Eggs have protein! So, boom, healthy, relatively.