In case you missed last week’s Kitchen Diaries post, check it out here.
Pies are incredible. They come in different shapes, sizes and crusts but they all hold the same core elements: vegetables and meat marinating in a delicious sauce that binds it all together, wrapped in a golden parcel of either pastry or mash potatoes.
Your pie is really your own creation. It can be chicken or beef, or carrots and onions. It can be potatoes or salmon or mackerel. But pies aren’t just two elements that sit as two individual pieces, no. They have to combine and merge and bake together so that where the filling meets the base, the base has all the flavour as well. A dry pie is a pie not worth eating.
When at a pub, if pie is on the menu, there’s no debating what to choose. It’s always pie. However, this time round I’m sharing a slightly different pie recipe - Spinach, Pea and Feta Filo Pie. Filo pastry is a very thin unleavened dough used for making pastries such as baklava and börek in Middle Eastern and Balkan cuisines. It is a much drier dough that’s stretched into paper-thin sheets, and then layered with melted butter or oil.
This recipe is one that I learned at work. For those of you who don’t know, I work as a project manager for a very small tech start up. We produce online courses and one of our biggest clients is Leiths School of Food and Wine. Prue Leith, who you will likely know from the Great British Bake Off, founded the school in 1975. Well, we partner with the school to produce all of its online courses, which if you’re interested, you can find out more here. For all the cookery courses we produce, I’m in the test kitchen filming all of it with a production team and if I’m lucky, trying the food as well.
Spinach, Pea and Feta Filo Pie
Ingredients
1 bag of filo pastry
1 tbsp oil
4 tbsp green pesto
300g frozen spinach, defrosted and well drained of excess water
300g frozen peas, defrosted
2 eggs
3 mild chillies or 2 tsp of dried chillies (optional)
100g feta
1 lemon zested
1 bunch of spring onions
45g butter
Salad leaves, to serve
Method
Zest the lemon and crumble the feta.
Finely chop the spring onions.
In a pan, add the spring onions and well-drained spinach. C
Cook until there is no liquid in the pan and the spring onions have started to soften. Stir through the defrosted peas and chillies, if you’re using. Season well with salt and pepper and add lemon zest. Remove from the heat and allow to cool for 5 minutes.
Preheat the oven to 200*C fan-assisted.
In a large bowl, beat the eggs and whisk in the pesto.
Once the spinach mix has cooled, add the egg and pesto mix to the pan. Stir thoroughly.
Melt the butter in a small saucepan. Tip: Always have extra butter on hand.
In a pie dish, begin layering your filo. There are two ways you can do this, you can layer your filo all around the tin, and transfer the pea and spinach mix in one go and then add more filo on top, or layer it with pastry, mix, pastry, mix. It’s entirely up to you. Don’t forget to add your crumbled feta between additions.
With the overhanging filo, scrunch it up to try and form an edge and top to the pie.
Place the dish on a tray and bake for 15-20 minutes or until the filling is set and the pastry is lovely and golden. Serve with a handful of salad leaves.
Let’s chat in the comments below - what’s your favourite type of pie?
This looks delicious! Now I have to find a good recipe for nondairy feta 😂
It’s funny, I never really think of savory pies much (I guess the sweet variety is more popular in the US). Of the dessert variety, I really like apple pie--I took a virtual class with Kate McDermott last month and have already made her recipe twice with excellent results! I also like pecan pie, but only in small doses and with black coffee on the side to balance the sweetness. One of my aunts used to make little pecan pie tartlets that were the perfect size!