Tiropitakia

Phyllo pastry has been haunting me for years now. One one hand I've had more than my fair share: it's hard to miss it when you travel to Greece and it's use in fancy restaurants is quite widespread. On the other whenever I found an inviting recipe involving this paper thin pastry I couldn't find anyone selling it. Phyllo may be easy to find in many places but clearly the gods of pastry where against me, up to now that is. And that has been going on, no kidding, for years. So you might justify and excuse my enthusiasm. I thank the Turkish people in Germany for this: if they didn't have such a big community, there'd be no Turkish food shops, and if they weren't there I'd have no phyllo dough. There's many recipes waiting to be tested but as first I just had to make tiropitakia the Greek triangular cheese pastries that have been my favourite Hellenic snack since the first time I spent my holidays in the land of Homer.

Tiropitakia are really easy to make, if you have phyllo dough that is. The filling is essentially a mixture of cheese and egg and eventually parsley. Probably the Greek will not be very happy about me saying this but I find this kind of pastries great for playing around with the filling. As I made my tiropitakia I ended with four extra sheets of phyllo dough so I filled them with a tiny amount of Harissa, some cream cheese and tuna. Tasted great, though a couple olives and capers would have worked great in there. Whatever filling you chose and depending on size, they're great eaten as a snack or as a light lunch with a sunny summer salad.

Tiropitakia

500 g (about 1 lb) phyllo dough
250 g (9 oz) feta
1 cup grated Kefalotiri (a greek cheese) or missing that Gruyere
1 cup melted butter
2 eggs
chopped parsley
pepper

Pre-heat your oven at 180C (350F). Crumble feta and mix with Kefalotiri, eggs, pepper and, if desired, parsley. Take two sheets of phyllo, stacked, and brush them with butter. Cut the dough into strips. Depending on the size you want for your tiropitakia you can cut the dough into 2, 4 or 8 stripes (with the dough I used these strips would measure 15, 7.5, and about 3.5 cm across). Now comes the only somewhat difficult part, the folding. place some cheese stuffing at one hand of the strip taking care to leave a bit of space between the stuffing and the actual dough border. Now fold one corner over the stuffing till its side overlaps the other side of the strip and go on in this fashion till you end up with a triangle. It is actually easier to understand looking at a how it goes in picture. Once all the triangles are finished place them on a baking tray lined with baking paper and bake for about 15 minutes till the tiropitakia start to brown.