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Cooking Experiment: Spinach Pie
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haikujaguar. She mentioned spinach pie, I looked it up, and thought 'hmm. Isn't that flakey golden crust kind of unhealthy? And all that cheese and egg!' Then I read the recipe. Not so bad, and phyllo dough turns out to be mainly wheat flour and water, not soaked with butter as I mistakenly had thought!
I started from this recipe...
Of course I had to make a few changes. For the one, I wanted a little meat in there. Ham? Well, I had just bought some ground turkey, so if I seasoned it, I could surely use that in place of the feta cheese. That's just in there for protein, right?
So I sautee'd onions and green onions, then mixed the turkey in, and once it was cooked, I set that aside. Then I sautee'd two pounds of spinach - and even with as large a frying pan as I have, that had to be done in two batches. It's amazing how much spinach shrinks when you cook it! I mixed that up with the meat and onions, poured out the juices - I saved that for a later stirfry - and mixed in eggbeaters and shredded low-fat mozzarella cheese.
Then I got out the phyllo dough! I had read about how this stuff must be kept cool so it had been in the refrigerator all this time. So at this point, I sprayed down the baking pan with butter-flavored cooking spray (I couldn't find spray-on olive oil), then put in a leaf of phyllo dough at a time, and sprayed more imitation butter on each.
Immediately I discovered that the sheets of phyllo dough were more rectangular than square. I started putting them in criss-cross fashion. Four layers on the bottom, then filling, then four on top, then I folded the overlaps over and baked for 45 minutes at 350 degrees in the toaster oven.
How'd it come out? Well honestly, the bottom crust got pretty soggy. If I do this again, I'm going to do as a friend suggests and make them into calzones instead. That way air will be free to flow around the top and sides, instead of just the top. In addition, I would probably turn the czlzone-spinach-pies over halfway through so that both sides can be turned into delicious flakey dough.
The top part came out fine though, and I think in terms of flavor, it was good.
And that's my cooking experiment for the weekend!
haikujaguar. She mentioned spinach pie, I looked it up, and thought 'hmm. Isn't that flakey golden crust kind of unhealthy? And all that cheese and egg!' Then I read the recipe. Not so bad, and phyllo dough turns out to be mainly wheat flour and water, not soaked with butter as I mistakenly had thought!I started from this recipe...
Of course I had to make a few changes. For the one, I wanted a little meat in there. Ham? Well, I had just bought some ground turkey, so if I seasoned it, I could surely use that in place of the feta cheese. That's just in there for protein, right?
So I sautee'd onions and green onions, then mixed the turkey in, and once it was cooked, I set that aside. Then I sautee'd two pounds of spinach - and even with as large a frying pan as I have, that had to be done in two batches. It's amazing how much spinach shrinks when you cook it! I mixed that up with the meat and onions, poured out the juices - I saved that for a later stirfry - and mixed in eggbeaters and shredded low-fat mozzarella cheese.
Then I got out the phyllo dough! I had read about how this stuff must be kept cool so it had been in the refrigerator all this time. So at this point, I sprayed down the baking pan with butter-flavored cooking spray (I couldn't find spray-on olive oil), then put in a leaf of phyllo dough at a time, and sprayed more imitation butter on each.
Immediately I discovered that the sheets of phyllo dough were more rectangular than square. I started putting them in criss-cross fashion. Four layers on the bottom, then filling, then four on top, then I folded the overlaps over and baked for 45 minutes at 350 degrees in the toaster oven.
How'd it come out? Well honestly, the bottom crust got pretty soggy. If I do this again, I'm going to do as a friend suggests and make them into calzones instead. That way air will be free to flow around the top and sides, instead of just the top. In addition, I would probably turn the czlzone-spinach-pies over halfway through so that both sides can be turned into delicious flakey dough.
The top part came out fine though, and I think in terms of flavor, it was good.
And that's my cooking experiment for the weekend!