Epirus Wild Greens Pie (Blatsaria)

Epirus is pie country. The mountains of the northwest have never been good farmland, and what the region has instead is greens, sheep, and a way with hand-rolled pastry that no other part of Greece can match. Blatsaria is the plainest and in some ways the best of the family.

There is no cheese in it and no egg, which puts it squarely in the fasting repertoire, and it means the greens have nowhere to hide. Cooks compensate by using an enormous amount of them and by leaning hard on leek and spring onion, which bring the sweetness that dairy would otherwise supply.

The pastry is a simple oil and water dough rolled as thin as the cook's arm allows, and the ratio matters more than the technique: two thin sheets and a filling three or four fingers deep. A blatsaria that looks like a pastry with some greens in it has been made the wrong way round.

Key preparation steps

1. Make a soft oil-and-water dough and rest it.
2. Salt and wring out a large quantity of mixed greens.
3. Roll two thin sheets and fill deeply.
4. Bake until the top is crisp and blistered.

Which greens go into blatsaria?

A mixture, always, and the more kinds the better. In Epirus that means whatever the hillside offered: dandelion, sow thistle, wild chicory, nettle, poppy leaves, vlita and chard. A pie made from one green tastes flat, because the balance of bitter and sweet is the whole flavour.

Away from a hillside, build the mix from spinach, chard, dandelion or chicory from a greengrocer, and a large bunch of leeks and spring onions. Aim for roughly a quarter bitter greens to three quarters mild, and never leave the leeks out.

Why must the greens be wrung out?

Greens are almost entirely water and a pie filling that releases it in the oven steams the bottom sheet into a wet grey layer. Salting the chopped greens and leaving them twenty minutes draws that water out before it can do any damage.

Then wring them, genuinely hard, a fistful at a time. The volume will drop by more than half and the pile will look alarmingly small. It is not: it will be exactly right once it is spread out in the tin.

Can I use shop-bought phyllo?

You can, and the pie will be good. Use four or five sheets top and bottom, brushing each with olive oil, since commercial phyllo is far thinner than a hand-rolled Epirot sheet and a single layer will tear.

The hand-rolled version is worth attempting at least once, though. Village phyllo is thicker, chewier and slightly irregular, and it holds up to a deep wet filling in a way that the paper-thin commercial sheets do not.

How do I get the top crisp?

Score the top sheet into portions before it goes in, brush it generously with olive oil, and flick a tablespoon of water over it. The water turns to steam and blisters the surface as the oil crisps it.

Bake it hot, 190C fan, on a low shelf so the base gets direct heat, and do not cover it at any point. Then let it stand at least twenty minutes out of the oven: a greens pie cut straight away collapses, and one left to settle slices cleanly.

What matters in this dish