How to make THE BEST Greek Spinach Pie / SPANAKOPITA

Hi everyone, welcome back to Dimitra's Dishes. So today I'm going to be making a video that's been requested over and over again. It's a classic, you know, Greek dish, spanakopita, also known as spinach pie. It's delicious, it's easy. This is not the appetizer kind, this is the full, like, entree version and it's delicious. It's honestly the best spanakopita that I've ever had and I've had so many. It's my mom's recipe, it's juicy, it's fresh tasting, it's delicious. And that's all because I do not cook the filling before I bake it. Everything is just chopped up and put up in one bowl, mixed up together. And you'll see what I'm talking about as we go through the video. Give it a try, it's super delicious and fresh tasting. Let's go over the ingredients and then we're going to get started. First we need a lot of spinach. This is baby spinach, a whole pound of it that I've chopped up a little finer. We're going to need some eggs, salt, olive oil, really high quality ricotta cheese. You get the whole milk kind, not skim or low fat or anything like that. I have a recipe on this that I'll post in the description box because it's easy to make anyway. You need some really good feta cheese, a lot of it. This is a pound. And then we need some pepper, some chopped up and washed scallions, dill, and a pound of phyllo dough. That's all. Now dill. I'm using dried dill because I really couldn't find any good fresh dill in my supermarket. Dried dill is really flavorful so you can definitely substitute it. But if you do have fresh dill growing in your backyard or if it's easy to find and it's really fresh from the supermarket, go ahead and use that. You're going to need about two bunches of it for this recipe. Now let me get some stuff out of the way. And it's super simple. All you have to do when you get, I like to buy the spinach that's baby spinach and that's already washed and ready to go. And all you do is just you chop it up a little bit. It doesn't have to be finely chopped. Just coarse is fine. Just like that. Now we're just going to put everything in our bowl. Alright, so to your spinach, you want to make sure you add your ricotta cheese and crumble up your feta cheese. This is a sheep's milk feta which is much milder than a regular feta but you can go ahead if you want to and use the more inexpensive cow feta that's found at the supermarket. Just don't buy the crumbles. Crumble it up yourself. It's really so simple. If you want to get rid of some of that excess salt taste, you could rinse this with some warm water before you use it and make sure you dry it afterwards. We add the chopped up scallions. Make sure you wash them properly and you dry them and you chop them up really really finely like this. Now to this I'm going to add a whole teaspoon of black pepper. You can put as much or as little as you like. And then I'll use, I'll put three heaping teaspoons of dry dill and I'll start off with just a half a teaspoon of salt and I'll taste it and see if it needs any more. It'll all depend on how salty the feta cheese is. And then to this I'm going to add a cup of olive oil and that's going to add more moisture and make it really nice. Now the best way to mix this is with your hands. Make sure your hands are nice and clean and don't add the eggs yet at this point because once it's done all like combined and mixed you're going to taste it and see if it needs more salt. And it's, I don't know, if you use really high quality eggs you shouldn't have a problem with salmonella or anything like that but just to be safe, taste it before you add the eggs. Okay once it's like this all well combined and really it just comes together after two three minutes of mixing with your hands, trust me there's no better way to do this. I've tried it many different ways. Okay and then I'm going to give it a little taste. To me that's perfect. I wouldn't add any more salt but if you want it a little bit saltier that'll be fine. Give your eggs a little whisk with a fork and then add them to here and give it another whisk mixing with your hands and then that's it the filling is ready just like that, that's simple. This is what the filling should look like once it's done. I'm going to wash my hands and then we're just going to fill it in the phyllo dough and it'll be ready. So you want to make sure that your phyllo dough has come to room temperature and the best way to do that is to leave it in your refrigerator overnight because this is usually sold in the freezer section and then a couple hours before you're ready to make this just take it out and leave it on your kitchen counter and let it stay at room temperature sealed in its packaging. Don't unpackage it until you're right at this point ready to use it. So what you do you want to have a half sheet baking tray, okay take some of your olive oil now you're going to need another about three quarters of a cup to a cup of olive oil and using your hands or a brush if you want to just rub olive oil all over this so that way it's easy to cut it and put it in your plate later on. So I just put three sheets on the bottom after I oiled it and now you want to take just a couple of sheets at a time you want to take two sheets at a time and just border to the edge of the tray so two sheets all around and while you're doing that you want to keep drizzling olive oil just with your hands all around like that just like that save the rest for the top of it. Now we're going to put the filling in the center and just spread it out evenly just like that and now just cover this with your filo dough put some more olive oil and now you're going to take two sheets at a time I'm just going to cover the top and tuck it under and do the same thing again with the olive oil kind of like you're making a pretty package and now here's a nice trick that I've learned so you can create a nice airy top you're just going to take one sheet at a time and you're just going to roughly fold it up on top sprinkling oil over each layer it doesn't matter if they tear up because they're just crumbling them up like this and just forming a nice crisp top I think I have two three sheets left I'm going to finish this up and fill in all the gaps now you're going to see when this is ready you're going to see why I did this once we're done baking it at this point I want to take the rest of this olive oil and just drizzle it all over the top and the sides and this is going to make this bake up to be golden and crispy and beautiful now what you want to do is take a really sharp knife and cut this into squares or triangles I'm going to cut the top portion into four pieces four long sections all the way down you can take out a ruler if you want to but really that's totally unnecessary this is a nice rustic beautiful dish just try to make it as even as possible and you want to go all the way down you have four sections on the long side and then you're going to cut this more shorter side into three sections that's going to give you twelve beautiful big pieces if you wanted to cut this into smaller pieces go right ahead cut it into as big or as small of a serving size as you want but once this is baked these are going to be your serving sizes so keep that in mind and we're going all the way through so that way this cooks beautifully and evenly and then it's going to be very easy to take this out of the pan later on that's it that's what it looks like all right that's it this is ready to go in the oven it's important that you preheat your oven to 450 degrees and then right when it's ready to go in you reduce the temperature to 350 degrees and let this cook for an hour after the hour is done it's going to be completely golden and brown and crispy on the top once you take it out of the oven after an hour let it cool for at least 20 minutes it's best to let this cool so that way all the juices set and the filling also sets a little bit and then I'm going to show you what it looks like as soon as it's ready I'm gonna go put this in my oven right now all right so the spanakopita was cooking for exactly an hour and then I took it out and I allowed it to sit at room temperature for 25 minutes and look at how beautiful it is it's golden brown you see all these ripples of the filo it's they're gonna it's gonna be nice and light and airy and crispy and exactly the way it's supposed to taste super super good like this now you want to take your knife and go down and just cut through all the areas that you scored before and see doing this ahead of time makes it so much easier to cut if you if you don't do this before you bake the pie all the filo will just crumble and fall apart you'll have a big huge mess so make sure you don't skip that step before baking now let me take out a piece and show you what it looks like the first piece is always for the chef so let me take one out look at that look at how beautiful how juicy it is on the inside it's not at all dried or black or whatever from overcooking spinach it cooked perfectly I'm gonna put in my plate see how moist it is it's just perfect let's cut into it and let me show you what it looks like you hear that crisp perfecto this my friends is the best spanakopita that I have ever tasted make sure that you make it so you can experience the goodness look at that it's moist it's it's just so so good I'm gonna have this piece this is perfect you can again cut it to smaller pieces if you wanted to fit feed a bigger crowd or maybe serve it as an appetizer but this is filling it's really healthy it's delicious to eat as a main entree with maybe like a nice salad or something like that have a nice vegetarian meal perfect it's really good also if you wanted to make put this all together before you bake it wrap it up airtight in plastic and make an extra tray and freeze it for whenever maybe you didn't have whenever you don't have time to cook or something like that it stays fresh in the freezer for up to a month maybe even more I'm gonna post the recipe for this and the link in the description box down below make it share pictures with me please let me know how you like it it's I know you're gonna love it and I'll see you guys next time bye everyone