Feel low? Phyllo!

 

 

Tonight’s fancy recipe is Tiropita:  a flaky Greek pastry stuffed with feta.  It’s like spanakopita, but without all the healthy spinach!  Sign me up!  It is somewhat labor-intensive, but it’s totally worth it.

The ingredients are simply a box of phyllo dough, cottage cheese, egg, and lots and lots of feta.

The egg and cheese are mixed together in a bowl.

If you’ve never worked with phyllo dough before, it can seem a little scary, but it shouldn’t be.  The dough is super thin and feels a lot like tissue paper.  However, it can break easily, and will dry out quickly if you aren’t careful.

The dough gets cut into 3 long strips.  We’ll start with 2-3 sheets from one of the strips.  The other strips are covered with wax paper and then covered with a wet towel.  Not a wet blanket… we’re having fun here!  This helps keep it from drying out.

The first batch of strips is brushed lightly with melted butter.  Butter plays a big role in this recipe. 

A dollop of cheese mixture is placed in one corner.  The corner is folded over the filling to form a triangle.  This is repeated all the way down the strip until it none of the dough is left.  It should be a nice little package of phyllo-wrapped cheese! 

For all you boy scouts, it’s just like folding an American flag with feta inside.

Then you just repeat that process about 30+ more times until you’ve used up all the dough.  We stored the completed packets between 2 sheets of wax paper.  We also brushed the tops with melted butter.

 

Also, there is butter.

When they’re all ready to go, they are placed on a buttered cookie sheet.  And then the tops are brushed again with melted butter.  Butter makes it better!

And here they are out of the oven.  We put some paper towels down to absorb some of the excess butter. 

Butter.

It’s crispy, flaky, light, and delicious!

 

BUTTERY!

Highway to the Danger CalZone

 

Ardent followers of Chez Venza will remember that we recently took a class at Central Market where they taught us how to make ricotta (oh, yeah, and also calzones).  While we previously blogged about making ricotta, we will now progress to the humble calzone.  A calzone is sort of like a pocket pizza, but way better.  Unlike a pizza, though, it tends to have more ricotta than mozzarella on the inside.  The sauce is also on the outside (for dipping).  So in retrospect, the calzone is nothing like a pizza!

So in order to start our calzone adventure, we naturally needed to make our own ricotta (‘cause that’s how we do it!). 

You can check out how we did that by reading our previous post.

We also made our own tomato sauce.  There are some places that just have fantastic pizza sauce, like Homeslice Pizza here in Austin.  I don’t know how they make theirs, but we’ve got a simepl reciep that works pretty well.  Saute a clove or two of minced garlic, add a can of crushed tomatoes along with oregano and red pepper flake and simmer for 15 minutes.  Add salt until it tastes addictive.

We decided to take a short-cut with the dough since we were making so many other things from scratch (this was a week-night after all).  Our HEB sells frozen, unbaked pizza dough, which is actually really good.  We’ve made pizza dough from scratch, and it ends up being pretty similar to the HEB dough.

  

The dough is formed into a 12 inch circle (more or less).  We pricked it with a fork to puncture air pockets that may be trapped inside the dough.  Left unchecked, they will puff up like a balloon!

 

Now comes the filling.  This is the fun part, because you can pretty much put in whatever you want…meatballs, pancetta, pepperoni, sausage, veggies, etc.  We decided on home-grown (not by us, we can only get so fancy), sautéed spinach, garlic, and Italian sweet sausage. 

The fillings are piled onto one half of the dough.  I also added some red pepper chili flake and parmesan cheese.  Then you fold over the other half of the dough on top of the filling.

The only tricky part is crimping the edges.  Pull the edge of the dough out a little and then fold it back over, pushing down hard so that it sticks.  You can add a little water around the edges of the dough to help with this if it’s not sticking very well.

Cut a couple of slits in the top to let the steam escape and brush it all over with olive oil.  Then it’s time for the oven!

We have a pizza stone, so we put the calzones on parchment paper and then put them on top of the stone.  But you could also use a baking sheet.  And yes there are 2 calzones in there (you are not seeing double).

Here they are all crispy and golden brown.  Apparently we didn’t divide the dough very evenly.  I claim the bigger one!

Cross view!  Doesn’t that ricotta look scrumptious?!  Serve with the homemade tomato sauce and enjoy!