Recipe: Savory filo pie with a filling
Love vegetable dishes and/or want to eat less meat? Elly Pear’s new cookbook Green is full of easy recipes for weekdays, as well as more elaborate showstoppers for the weekend. Elly shows that with just a few ingredients, it’s easy to vary with vegetarian and vegan dishes, and that cooking plant-based dishes, such as this savory filo pie with a filling, can be surprisingly delicious.
Elly: “With this pie, you can choose between two fillings: spinach with nutmeg or roasted squash with smoked paprika. I’m also giving you two different preparation methods: either you make filled ‘filo sausages’, which you place in a spiral in a round baking tin (this way, the inside of the pie also looks very attractive), or you simply line the pie tin with the filo pastry, add the filling and place a sheet of pastry on top. Garnish the top with some filo pastry balls. This last method is quicker, and the result is also impressive.”
How to make the savory filo pie with a filling
- Preheat the oven to 200 °C. Grease a round baking tin 25 cm in diameter with butter and line the base with baking paper.
- Heat the olive oil in a frying pan over low heat. Add the red onion and a pinch of sea salt flakes and sweat the onion for 10 minutes until translucent. Leave it to cool.
- Spoon the onion into a bowl and add the other ingredients for the filling, together with the spinach or squash mixture (as desired). Season the filling with plenty of salt and pepper. Stir everything together well.
- Place a large sheet of baking paper on the work surface. Place a sheet of filo pastry on top. (Cover the other sheets of filo pastry with a clean tea towel for now, so they do not dry out.) Brush the sheet of filo pastry all over with the melted butter and place a second sheet of pastry on top. Spread one quarter of the filling as evenly as possible over the filo pastry. This may seem like very little, but that’s how it should be. Too much filling at this stage will result in an absolute disaster!
- Fold over a 2½ cm edge on both short sides.
- Fold over a 2½ cm edge along one of the long sides. Continue folding the pastry in this way (it is better to fold than roll, to prevent the filling from being pushed out) until it forms a long sausage shape. Place this sausage along the inside edge of the baking tin and work towards the center. Repeat this process with the remaining filling and filo pastry sheets, making three more filo sausages. Place these in the baking tin in the same way, working further towards the center and close together.
- Whisk the egg yolk with 1 tablespoon of melted butter and brush the top of the pie with it. Sprinkle it with the sesame seeds or za’atar. Bake it for 30 minutes in the hot oven until golden and risen.
- The second method: grease a sheet of filo pastry and place it in the prepared baking tin. Place two more butter-greased sheets on top. (Do not place them exactly on top of each other, but rotate them slightly.) Spoon in the filling, fold the edges of the pastry over it and place another butter-greased sheet of filo pastry on top. Tuck the edges in neatly (as if you were making a bed).
- Tear another sheet of filo pastry into 6 pieces and crumple them slightly. Place these ‘pastry scraps’ on top of the pie. Carefully brush it with the egg-and-butter mixture and sprinkle the sesame seeds or za’atar over it. Bake the pie for 20–25 minutes in the hot oven, until it is cooked, crisp and golden.
- Leave the pie to cool for a few minutes before serving. Any remaining sheets of filo pastry can easily be frozen for later use.
Title: Green
Author: Elly Pear
Price: €25
Publisher: Spectrum
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