Greek Dopers/Ethnic cooks: Anyone have a recipe for Kasseropita?

Cafe Society
1

Ok, I was just poking around the internet and discovered that one of my favorite cheeses is made into a pie and I like pie. Greek Kasseri cheese is a pungent hard cheese similar to parmesan. Apparently in Greece you can get a pie called Kasseropita that has Kasseri and phylo dough as its main ingredients.

Alas, I can’t afford to travel to Greece and I can’t find a recipe. Would love to try it, though. Can anyone help?

2

I don’t have a recipe, but it’s easy enough to wing it off a spanakopita or tiropita (spinach pie, cheese pie) recipe.

This oneis a likely candidate. I wouldn’t use all kasseri cheese - you want the flavor, but I think it’d be too intense and not fluffy enough if it were all you used. I’d use maybe a pound of ricotta and a pound of shredded kasseri. I think the ricotta is bland enough that the kasseri will come through.

I’d skip the walnuts and honey.

I don’t know if I’ve ever had kasseropita exactly, but I lived off tiropita when I was in Greece. Now I want some!

3

Thanks, Athena. I’ll have to decide if I’m capable enough to handle phyllo. It looks hard.

4

There’s a bit of a technique to it, but if you know how to handle it, it’s not that hard. Here’s the tricks I’ve learned:

  • It comes frozen. You MUST thaw it in the fridge for at least overnight, maybe longer. It can last several days or a week in the fridge, so if you buy it a few days before you need it and refrigerate it, that’s ideal. The reason for this is that there is no way that you can quickly thaw phyllo and have it not either dry out or become really gummy.

  • When it comes time to use it, lay out the whole package flat on a kitchen towel. Take another kitchen towel and spray it with water or run it under a barely-dripping faucet to dampen it some. Cover the phyllo with the damp towel. As you’re making the pies, pull out a sheet at a time and then cover it back up. Phyllo dries out REALLY quickly.

  • Don’t worry about it if some of the sheets do tear or crack a little bit. Most recipes call for several layers of phyllo rolled around the filling - that’s a VERY forgiving method, and any tears or breaks will typically get covered by another layer. So don’t freak out if something isn’t perfect, once they’re cooked and you’re eating them, you won’t even notice.

That’s about it. It’s really not all that hard to work with, provided you don’t let it dry out or get overly wet.