Spinach and cheese pie

This recipe was inspired by my difficult relationship with filo pastry. Here’s the thing: you never use a full packet, and the other half ends up drying out in the fridge or worse still in the freezer. I hate food waste so this irks me. But anyway, I don’t really enjoy eating filo – too messy, too many greasy flakes of pastry everywhere.

What I do like though is some of the pastries that are typically made with filo, particularly the savoury ones. So, I wanted to make a spinach and feta pie as part of a mezze for friends, and was trying to think of an alternative to filo. Puff or flaky is too much pastry, shortcrust doesn’t work, I could have used samosa pastry but didn’t want anything that had to be fried at the last minute. Then I remembered the strudel pastry I used to make, back in the mists of time when I had enough time and room to roll it out wafer-thin across the entire dining room table. This comes under the heading ‘too much like hard work’ now.

The thing that makes this much more practical is that I now have a pasta machine. This is one bit of kitchen kit I can heartily recommend. It keeps small children amused in school holidays, makes a very easy dinner feel like a luxury, and CRUCIALLY can be used for more than just pasta. I already used it to roll out samosa dough and dumpling dough. Why not strudel dough?

So here is my no-filo spinach and cheese pie. Note that you can alter the proportion of spinach and cheese, or use other fillings (could add minced or chopped chicken instead of cheese, or spiced potato or lentils would be good, or baked beans and cheese if you’re an absolute monster), but I would make sure they’re cool before using and not too wet. If you want it shiny, you could glaze it with an egg wash, but I wasn’t bothered. You can, of course, also use it for strudel by cutting the strips and patching them together to make a larger square sheet. And, in case I haven’t persuaded you to buy a pasta machine, I’ve included a method for rolling the dough by hand.

Serves 3, or more as part of a mezze

For pastry:

• 100g ’00’ pasta flour or white strong flour (or plain flour if that’s all you have)
• pinch salt
• 1 large egg

For filling:

• 1 tbsp olive oil + extra to brush the pan
• 1 small onion, chopped
• 3 spring onions, sliced
• 900g fresh spinach, washed and wilted, squeezed dry, then chopped OR 4 x 80g blocks of frozen spinach, defrosted, squeezed dry, and chopped
• 100g feta cheese, crumbled
• half tsp dried dill OR few sprigs of fresh dill, picked and chopped
• 1 heaped tsp dried parsley OR small bunch of fresh parsley (flat or curly), chopped
• a handful of pine nuts
• salt and pepper
• 1 egg
• Sesame seeds for topping

Make the pastry by pouring the flour into a bowl with a pinch of salt, making a well in the centre, breaking in the egg, and mixing with a knife till you have a dryish dough (add a little water if you need to, but it should be a stiff dough). Knead briefly until smooth, wrap in clingfilm or a damp cloth, and leave at room temperature for 30 mins.

Pre-heat the oven to 190C, Gas Mark 5.

Heat the oil in a frying pan and saute the onion and spring onion till soft but not coloured. Take the pan off the heat and mix in the spinach, cheese, herbs and pine nuts. Add salt and pepper, and taste to check seasoning before adding the egg to bind.

When the pastry has rested, dust with flour and roll it out on a pasta machine thinly to a single long strip, about 7-9 cm wide. If you do not have a pasta machine, divide it into two and roll each half into a long thin sausage, then roll each flat to about 7-9 cm wide with a rolling pin and join the two resulting strips with a little water or egg to make a long strip. Place the cooled filling along the length of the strip, damp one edge of the dough, then roll over from the undamped edge to enclose filling, working carefully from one end to the other. Coil the resulting sausage of pastry and filling into a spiral, and slide carefully into an oiled heatproof pan (I used a 18cm cast-iron frying pan but you could use a shallow cake pan or tart tin – the spiral should fit fairly closely to keep the shape). Brush a little more oil over the top (or egg wash), and scatter over the sesame seeds.

Bake for about 30 mins until golden brown, turning the pan halfway through cooking. If it starts to brown too quickly, turn the heat down a little. When baked, allow to cool a little, then slide out carefully onto a plate and cut into wedges for serving.