Day 17: Orthodox Monk's Olive Pie Recipe Disclosed

Olive pie.  It sounds yummy - if you like olives.  It sounds like a food that we should try.  Especially since it seems that, as Greeks, we have olives at almost every meal.  Why not make a pie?  Having never made olive pie before, we are a little unsure of what the end result will look like.  But, that is what we are doing here together -- learning and sharing.  We hope that if anyone has a different recipe, you would be willing to share with us, too.

There are many places around Greece that are known for the various pites (πίτες) made with phyllo dough, and this is a different type with a homemade bread-like dough.  Cypriots, in particular, are known for their delightful olive breads.  And, Macedonia is known for their olive and leek pites. Regardless of where you are in Greece, or in Canada or the U.S., a pita is a good food to have any time of day, any time of year.

At first, we thought this recipe looked very easy.  After all, many of the recipes in the Monastery Cookbook are straightforward and easy to understand.  The trick is knowing that many of the measurements come in the form of "soup spoon" or "drinking glass" and that can be tricky, since we all have different sizes of drinking glasses.  Anyway, the measurements can be figured out after one or two recipes, so we are not too worried about that.  They do have a conversion table in the book to help with grams to pounds, litres to ounces, and celsius to Fahrenheit.  But, when the directions say use a soup spoon, we felt that only an actual soup spoon would be accurate, so we did not adjust that.  Some of the measurements are undefined.  For example, in this recipe, the directions stated to dissolve the tahini in some water.  We did not know exactly how much water is some.  Everyone defines "some" differently, so we felt there was room for error.  Also, the language used can be a little misleading.  The ingredient list called for 1/2 kilo farina.  So, we read through the directions, expecting that the word "farina" would be used there, since it was in the directions.  Well, that was not true.  The word "farina" from the ingredients list was replaced with "flour" in the directions.  That, in itself, was actually helpful, because we then knew exactly what farina was.

We chose to follow the recipe of the Greek Monastery Cookbook for several reasons.  First, we know that the ingredients used in this cookbook are common enough, and many can be found year-round in any grocery store.  Also, we believe that most of what is created at a Monastery can be considered "organic".  Monasteries are known for growing their own food and using only what they can grow.  I don't know if they ground their own flour, though.  And, we all know that organic food and organic ingredients are very popular right now!  Regardless, in this book, there is even a detailed chart about what foods to eat in which season.  It is typical and historical that we (Greeks) eat seasonal foods.  It does seem unnatural to enjoy strawberries in the winter, even if they are available to us.  So, in this book, we tried to find a seasonally appropriate recipe.  Flour, tahini, olives are all year-round staples int he kitchen, so we did not think twice about using any of it.  Even the leeks in the recipe are plentiful this time of year.  For some of us who grow our own herbs, we have fresh herbs year round -- otherwise, we have frozen fresh herbs from the summer harvest.

Back to the recipe and the cookbook... All of the recipes from this book are scaled to feed 10 monks.  That is 10 people unless otherwise noted.  As we were flipping through the pages, we did not note any change to that number, and we stuck to the original amounts.  If you are part of a family or group who are big eaters, you may want to make the full recipe for five people instead of ten.  We considered cutting it down, but thought this would be a nice food to have on hand for the week, so we made it for 10 people.

First, we gather the ingredients we need for this olive pie.  You will need this short list:
1 cup (250 grams)pitted dry black olives (the wrinkled ones),
3 soup spoons of tahini,
2-2 1/2 cups (1/2 kilo) flour,
a little salt,
2 scallions (green onions),
1 leek (another onion),
some dill,
3/4 cup (150 grams)walnuts,
and some water.
If you have a nut allergy, you can omit the nuts and replace that with more of the vegetables, more olives, or just omit it all together.

We have to make sure that all of the olives are pitted.  This takes time, but is safer for our teeth when we bite into this delightful pie.  There may even be tools like a cherry pitter to help in this task.  We used our hands, squeezed the olive, and the pit popped right out!  Or, a knife would cut the olive and you then pluck out the pit.  Whatever way is easiest for you.  This is a good activity to do while watching television or talking on the phone.

Next, all of the filling ingredients are chopped.  We used a food processor, but we are certain this is easy to do by hand.  And, to make sure we got it right, we chopped each ingredient individually.  We think that  we could have put them all together, pulsed the food processor a few times and been done; but, wanting to get it right was more important.  Now, in hindsight, if we are short on time and want to make this, then putting all the filling ingredients together and chopping once seems like a reasonable timesaver.




Then, there is the dough.  You have to dilute the tahini in some water.  The book did not offer an amount of water to use, but it was 3 soup spoons full of tahini.  By our estimates, we thought half a cup, but not more than 3/4 cup was adequate for the 2 to 2 1/2  cups of flour.  Use your best judgement for the water.  You want to create a dough, and the amount of water can vary depending on the type of flour and the age of it.  We used a regular, all-purpose flour for this recipe.

Roll out half the dough to fit the baking dish.  Make sure that the dough goes up the sides so it creates a "pie" in that way.  The book gave no directions on how thick or thin to roll out the dough, or even how big of a baking dish.  So, we took our best guess and used a medium sized glass baking dish.  We, then, rolled out the other half of the dough for the top of the pie.  We tried to get that the same size as the baking dish.


Using a pastry brush, coat the bottom and the sides of the baking dish with tahini.  This will give a nice flavour; like adding sesame seeds on top of bread.  The tahini also adds a little colour and will prevent the dough from sticking to the baking dish.  You could use oil if you prefer.  Our second choice would have been to use a pan spray to coat the baking dish.  But, the pastry brush with tahini was easy, and we had tahini in the recipe, where we have used
no oil, so this seemed to make sense.







Once the dough is fitted to the baking dish, and the top portion is set it aside.  We are going to now mix all the ingredients for the filling.

Make sure that the individual components are evenly distributed in the mix, so that with each bite you get the delightful dill, and the pungent olives.

Then, take this filling mixture and put it in the baking dish with the ready bread crust on the bottom.

Once the filling is spread around to fully cover the bottom of the pie, then, unfold, lay, or place the top dough piece over the entire amount of filling in the baking dish.  It should cover all of the filling.








Next is the part that we found a little tricky.

We had to pinch the dough together, then make the edges fold into the baking dish.  We tried several methods of pinching, crimping, folding, and snipping.  But, we found that simply folding over the edges was the easiest to keep the top and bottom together, and it looked clean and homemade.  We liked the look. 

  

 Next, we baked the pita at 200 degrees Celsius (about 400 degrees Farenheit) until it got a nice golden  colour.  The directions told us to bake for one hour at 200 C, but we think that may have been a little long for a baking time.   Perhaps baking it for 40 to 45 minutes at such a high temperatre would have been adequate.

 There it is.  The final product.  In total, we were able to do this start to finish in about one hour - that's including all the pictures that we took and all the translating of the recipe.

We have several observations about this delicious Olive Pie.  The next time that we make this, we are going to wash off or soak the olives.  The final product was salty, and the only salt in the recipe was in the dough.  The only salt that was in the filling came from the olives.  For three of our tasters, this was just too salty, so wash the olives, or soak them for a day before use.  If you are a salt fanatic, then don't bother.

Next, we want to point out that the measurements for this recipe were awkward to us.  We came up with the more standardized 2 cups of flour, 1 cup of olives, etc.  The book has the amounts listed in grams.  Without a scale, using weight measures did not work.  We used general converting and rounding off of amounts to come up with what we did.  We think that a few of our amounts could be adjusted to make this even tastier.  We wrote the amounts that we used in pencil in the book, so that next time we make this, we will know what amounts of what we used, and we will be able to refer to this blog to refresh our memories of what worked and what did not.  

Lastly, we want to mention that the recipe called for "some dill".  For us, we love the taste of dill, so we used some by our measure which would be a lot for others.  Each one of us would have a different amount of dill, which would make everyone's pie unique.  The salt of the olives did somewhat overpower the lovely taste of the dill.  But, that's okay.  There were other flavours that shined through everything.  One of which was the tahini in the bread dough came through subtly and perfectly.  It was a lovely taste that lingered a little.

The only other adjustment we would make would be the bread dough -- since the directions did not tell us how long to knead the dough, how thick to roll out the dough, or how large to roll it (nor how large the baking tray), we made our best guesses at all of these -- rolling it to the size of the baking dish made sense to us.  Yet, when we bit into the pie, we  found the bottom crust was too thin and fell apart as we served each piece.  The top dough was good enough, but we believe there are better ways to do this.  Next time, we would roll the bottom a little thicker than the top.  And, we would trim the edges when sealing the two pieces (top and bottom) together.  

The pinched and rolled edges were very crisp and hard after baking.  That's why we think that cutting off the excess dough and then creating a simple crimping pattern will make an edible crust.  We would approach it the same way we do a sweet pie with the pattern -- whether that is using a fork or our fingers, and that will help us to not be embarrassed to serve the corner pieces.  As for tonight's pie, the corners were cut out and discarded because they were inedible.  For future pies, we know better.

Overall, we enjoyed this recipe, and we still think this cookbook is a must for any good Orthodox Christian who follows the fasting schedule.  There is such a large variety of recipes and so much other information in these 367 pages.  Like any cookbook, there will be recipes you love and recipes you don't love.  That's okay.  We will make this recipe again and try a few of the mentioned suggestions.  If you have other ways to make this pie, we would love to know.  This will be a staple in our kitchen for all of the fasting periods.

"Provided they live a worthy life, both those who choose to dwell in the midst of noise and hubbub and those who dwell in monasteries, mountains and caves can achieve salvation. Solely because of their faith in Him God bestows great blessings on them. Hence those who because of their laziness have failed to attain salvation will have no excuse to offer on the day of judgment. For He who promised to grant us salvation simply on account of our faith in Him is not a liar."

—St. Symeon the New Theologian