Hey friends! I wanted to post this last night but that didn’t end up happening…but 1-day procrastination looks good given my history so I’ll give myself a pat on the back for doing this.
Ingredients-
Saganaki: filo pastry, feta cheese, honey, sesame seeds
Meat filling: ground beef, onion, lemon, pepper, ras el hanout, harissa powder, salt, tomato, walnuts, optional seasoning(oregano, parsley etc.)
Pie base and crust: filo pastry, melted butter, olive oil, milk, egg
Yoghurt sauce: tomato, yoghurt, salt, pepper, olive oil
I bought filo pastry a while ago because I wanted to make this Greek dish I saw online called saganaki. Found a bunch of recipes online which essentially were just wrapping feta cubes in filo pastry, frying them(yes), topping them with honey and sesame! Good stuff.
I had leftover filo and wanted to do something savoury, so I sort of came up with this meat-filo-pie-pastry thing one night. If you have any suggestion as to what I should call it let me know please. I suck at naming things, and I know this blog has a pretty smart name but it was all Eeraj.
You’ll need some ground beef, to which I added salt, pepper, lemon, harissa powder and ras el hanout (both are North African seasonings, and add amazing flavour to beef). This made it taste super Middle Eastern immediately, which was what I was looking for to begin with. I guess you could add whatever seasonings you wanted and make it a regional specialty thing. Like imagine making meat seasoned with taco spices or a rendang pie (RIP…). You would have to switch everything up in the recipe depending on what would go with how you spice your meat, but that’s really where the fun in cooking lies.
After adding spices to my beef and mixing it thoroughly, I chopped up a lot of onion, tomato and walnuts. I began with sautéing about half (look, an accurate estimate) of the onions I chopped initally (oh look, no accurate estimate) in olive oil, and adding the beef and the rest of the onion after the onions were lightly browned. You could easily add in garlic, oregano, parsley, whatever tickles your fancy. I think I added oregano the second time I made it and it added good flavour to the dish.
After cooking the beef for a bit, there should still be a lot of liquid, which is normal if you’re working with ground beef. I then added the tomato I chopped initially, and let it cook and sort of caramelise/dry out. After all the liquid evaporated, I added the chopped walnuts and let them toast for a bit. The tricky part here is making sure the beef isn’t extremely dry. I did make a yoghurt sauce for this though, and that may have helped with the slight dryness of the beef. You’ll be baking it and you don’t want the juices to seep through and give it a soggy bottom (I can’t believe I’m able to use this phrase irl…GBBO reference-if you don’t get it you don’t get it).
Once you’re done with the beef, you can begin assembling the filo. This was the worst part and I wanted to die doing this. I made a mixture of melted butter and olive oil to brush between the layers, and alternated between that and 4 layers of filo first. I then spooned in and smoothened the meat filling before finishing off with another 4 layers of alternating filo and butter+OO. I then cut the pie into 1/8ths, and then pouring a mixture of beaten egg and milk over it. One egg and a splash of milk should do the trick.
Bake it for a good 30 minutes, then keep checking every 4-5 minutes. I ended up baking it for a good 50 minutes at 375, but this would depend on the thickness of the pie as well as your oven, so feel it out. For the sauce, I mixed diced tomato, olive oil, pepper, and Greek yogurt. Wait for the pie to cool slightly, and that’s pretty much it!
here’s a nice photo that adds no value but could probably propel me to cookstagram fame
dine with ain 