Matthew Woolen is a master pastry chef and has worked in a variety of Seattle restaurants, including gastropub Old Sage, Zhu Dang, and a gluten-free restaurant called Capitol Cider.

Matthew Woolen

Spanakopita is the Greek spinach pie that’s pretty great even when it’s mid: Greasy layers of phyllo dough packed around wads of spinach are given the semblance of seasoning by gluey supermarket feta. But what if you made it actually great? What if you used Savoy spinach, mixed with homemade <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/sous-vide-farmer-cheese">farmer cheese</a>, wrapped in flaky layer after flaky layer of scratch-made <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/phyllo-dough">phyllo dough</a>? Well, that’s what we did: We made the ultimate homemade spanakopita. And now you can, too!The key to excellent pies made with phyllo dough is excellent phyllo dough, and the frozen stuff doesn’t compare to freshly made. Fresh phyllo is easier to work with—it’s resilient, not brittle—and bakes up into distinct layers of light and crispy pastry that are impossible to achieve with mass-produced frozen dough. Of course, you could use this exact recipe with frozen phyllo and store-bought cheese, and it’ll turn out pretty, pretty good, just like all the other spanakopita recipes (and that goes for the recipes for spanakotiropita, technically the more accurate name for the Greek cheese-and-spinach pie, and for other phyllo pies, like börek). So, do you want the crispiest, flakiest, and most delicious spanakopita you’ve ever had or a pretty good spinach pie? The choice is yours.No matter what kind of phyllo you use, the way you assemble the pie is super important. After many trials, we found that a simple strudel log shape was the best way to produce super crispy layers of phyllo, as it maximizes the surface area exposed to the hot oven air. You also want to be gentle when rolling the log: Roll too tight and you’ll squeeze out the olive oil and air trapped between each pastry layer and the pie won’t bake up as flaky and crispy.

Spanakopita (Spinach and Cheese Pie)