Welcome back to The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off, where Kelsey and Chris attempt to complete the technical challenges from the newest season of The Great British Bake Off in their own home kitchens, with the same time parameters as the professional-grade bakers competing on the show.
The challenge for the fifth technical bake of the current season of the very popular The Great British Bake Off—and thus of the even more popular Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off—was to make Paul Hollywood's Spanakopita. You—innocent, naive, like a spotted fawn moving in on a patch of clover in a forest clearing—naturally have zeroed in on the word "spanakopita" for forming an image in your mind of what this bake will produce. You fool!
Spanakopita is a Greek spinach pie made with layered phyllo. Phyllo is an unleavened pastry dough that when properly made cooks to a crackling, brittle texture. Like yufka or rétes or strudel, phyllo is kneaded until it is very smooth and elastic, and then rested for a long time to relax the proteins or whatever and make the dough easier to work into its final form, which should be thin enough that it is translucent. To achieve this final form, the baker rolls and hand stretches the dough into a very large flat shape, using a rolling pin and careful fingers and soft dish rags, being maximally careful never to tear the dough, even as it becomes so thin that if you placed your hand palm-up underneath it, you could take measurements of your money line. The dough is then wiped down with oil or melted butter and rolled around some kind of filling—in this case spinach, herbs, and cheese—or cut into shapes, wiped down with melted butter, and stacked under and over a filling, and then baked. At all times the baker has to be both self-assured in their handling of the phyllo and also extraordinarily delicate. This sounds like a monstrous challenge, but really it is not: Making phyllo takes time, space, patience, and nimble fingers, but most people who have ever made pastries in their kitchen can manage a decent version of it.
This makes phyllo a very good choice for a technical bake. Many bakers will not have made it before, but the cool-headed ones who have a basic understanding of how the dough is supposed to look and feel will get there through intuition, and the ones who have made phyllo before (or yufka or rétes or strudel) will have memory in their fingers, and an assortment of little tricks, and will do it faster and better. Charging the bakers with making phyllo from scratch, the old manual way, will showcase both experience and intuition, and will demonstrate an ancient baking technique, and will produce a fully authentic finished product. Great idea, Paul!
Except that the words to zoom in on up there do not include "spanakopita." Like Joey Crawford blowing his whistle on a key late-game possession entirely in order to make himself the center of attention, Paul Hollywood made this challenge not about producing authentic spanakopita, or even about the production of phyllo. He made it about doing a Paul Hollywood bake. So instead of rolling and stretching phyllo dough with careful hands, the bakers are asked to make long uniform sheets of phyllo using a pasta maker. And so the challenge becomes about wrangling an unfamiliar piece of equipment, as was the case when Prue Leith demanded that bakers produce caramelized white chocolate from a microwave, in order to make cheesecake.
It sucks when the judges do this! The question answered in this technical bake should have been Can you make great phyllo dough? Instead, the question answered is How familiar are you with this pasta maker? If the answer is Not very, then probably what you will have made at the end of your bake is pretty lousy phyllo. Am I a little bit more angry about this than is reasonable? Perhaps! Then again, I am the one who spent 150 minutes of my life working to prove the genius of Paul Hollywood, at the expense of making a delicious spanakopita. I want my life back, to say nothing of my spinach and cheese.
Chris Thompson: Kelsey, I feel that it may finally be time for us to rise up and overthrow Paul Hollywood. How are you feeling this morning?
Kelsey McKinney: Chris, let me tell you. I texted several people yesterday during the bake that I wanted to destroy Paul Hollywood because I was so angry. I assumed that sleeping would make this desire fade, but it DID NOT! I feel awake and full of rage and fury.
CT: To be clear, we would never actually destroy anyone, certainly not after having talked about doing so in a blog published to the internet.
KM: Definitely not! We are kind souls who have been pushed to the brink. Instead we will keep our feelings of fury and anger inside our hearts forever where we will hold a grudge against Paul Hollywood that we will pass down for generations and that will never ever die.
CT: What's funny, in my case, is for all my bitching about Paul over the years I actually do not generally dislike the big galoot. I think I would have a fine time drinking and eating with Paul Hollywood! But I am Big Mad at Big Paul for this one. We're on the outs! He's in the doghouse!
KM: Yeah, to be honest, I only dislike Paul Hollywood the way you dislike the lesser sibling of a dear friend. In this case it is Guy Fieri who I consider my dear friend in my heart, and Paul Hollywood who is his lesser half. Guy Fieri would never ask us to do such stupid fiddly things that have no purpose!
CT: Yeah Guy Fieri would be like, "Just put some Karo Syrup on that baby! Awesome town!"
KM: Hell yeah, brother! Unfortunately, today's bake had zero Karo Syrup and infinite pain.
Ingredients and Shopping
CT: How'd you do with your shopping this time? Superficially, this was a pretty basic list of ingredients.
KM: OK, well. Yet again, I thought I did a really good job with the shopping.
CT: Hmm. You thought you did a good job. And then … whammo! Whammo mode?
KM: Well I'm sure we will get to the spinach situation, but this recipe calls for 900 grams of spinach. I had one of those giant "family sized" plastic clamshells full of spinach, which I assumed would be enough but turned out to only be 280 grams. Almost everything else, though, I had!
CT: Ugh, the spinach situation. I had a similar issue. Usually I do my own shopping for the bakes, but this time I put stuff on the list and then my wife—who is usually a huge help to us in these bakes, dutifully editing the instructions ahead of time—surprised me by hitting up the grocery store and getting everything on the list. But the list, crucially, did not include precise amounts.
KM: OK, but that was so nice of her!
CT: Yes! So she too got one of the big plastic clamshell tubs of spinach, which despite being very large and impressive actually contained approximately one eighth of the spinach necessary for this recipe. Also she returned with less than the required amount of cheese, although that was a smaller problem. I suppose we will get to the ramifications of these deficits soon enough.
KM: The main ingredients for this bake, though, were so simple it was a little concerning: bread flour, water, butter, olive oil, salt. I have all of these things in my kitchen all the time! I would never not have them. Usually what fucks us up is a leavening agent but there wasn't even one of those!
CT: And then just some herbs and spices, which are easy enough to track down. But the dough part was so simple that it did feel, perversely, kind of daunting.
KM: Yeah, and I like to have herbs because if there is one edict of home cooking I believe in it is: Mound a bunch of herbs on top!
CT: Big same! We are an herb family.
KM: In the summer, I have my herbs outside, but sadly that season has ended, so I did have to buy dill at the store. The dill bunch is the size of a wedding bouquet. I love it.
The other things that were important here were the supplies. The recipe called for a springform pan, which magically, I already own from another bake, and a pasta machine. I have a pasta machine that my aunt got me for my birthday that is hand-crank and very lovely. I haven't used it in a long time because now I live very close to fresh pasta I can buy with my money, but I was excited to be reunited. Tell the readers about your pasta machine problem, Chris.
CT: The goddamned pasta machine. I used to have a hand-crank pasta machine that I used pretty regularly for a period of a couple years. Then I moved, and then I moved again, and then I had a child, and somewhere along the way I lost first the crank for the machine and then the clamp, and then sometime later I threw it away. I was skeptical from the start of the whole phyllo-from-a-pasta-machine proposition, but as we got close to the bake I accepted that I would probably not have time to make Paul Hollywood's thing the old-fashioned way, which was somewhat distressing. I was fretting about this with no real plan of action and then when my wife returned with the groceries she was also holding a little box, and inside the box was a brand new pasta maker, which she purchased for me for this exact purpose.
KM: I want to admit that this was the first time I have ever made phyllo dough, and that I did not know that you were not supposed to use a pasta machine to make it. When I read your description above, I realized that I would have really, really liked to roll out the dough slowly and thinly. It would have been very soothing for me. Instead, the pasta machine made me rather stressed. But I do think it's lovely that you got a new pasta machine, and I demand that you expense it.
CT: I don't know that it's exactly a matter of "supposed to," but as a technical challenge on a baking show it just strikes me as preposterous to force the use of a pasta maker. The challenge should be designed to advantage a person who has experience making phyllo the manual way, not to disadvantage that person in favor of someone who has experience making lasagna. I will never stop being angry about this. Etch it onto my tombstone.
KM: Yeah! We should have had to decide to use a pasta machine by our own whim based on nothing!
Stage One: Making and Kneading Dough
CT: The first item of business in this bake, both in our limited instructions and just intuitively, was to make a blob of dough. How did you approach this task?
KM: Well, I used some close-reading skills here, and noticed there was no leavening agent. So I figured this could not be complicated, and just mixed the flour and salt together and then poured the water and olive oil into a little well in the center and mixed it up.
Then I began kneading it and it was so hard to knead because the bread flour is strong and also there is no leavening agent. I intended to knead for 10 minutes or 500 kneads, as I did in the past. But I only made it to like 300 kneads before my deltoids began to hurt and I gave up. What did you do?
CT: I did basically the same thing. I felt blessed that we had very recently made rough puff for Caramel Week, and so I had a very recent memory of an extremely dry-seeming mixture of ingredients eventually cohering into a blob of dough. This was similar, in the sense that at first I felt like I could not possibly have added enough liquid to the bowl, but I reminded myself of the pastry dough from last week and I kept at it and eventually it did all stick. I also found the kneading to be so tough, but it was that good cathartic toughness that I love about making bread.
KM: Yes. My partner came down while I was kneading in the dry portion to get coffee. Unfortunately the coffee was right in front of where I was kneading, so I had a Noel-esque experience similar to when Fred visited me, where there was some concern that my dough was too dry and I was just saying I KNOW! I KNOW! I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO TELL YOU! But after I kneaded it for a million years, it looked like normal dough.
CT: For me the pain was largely in my forearms and wrists, which possibly signals that I am kneading poorly, but I loved it. I'm not sure exactly how long I kneaded but it could not have been much longer than 12 minutes. I was looking for a very smooth and elastic dough, and it just felt like it took a long time to get there.
KM: Today my arms feel sore, so that's another reason to be mad at Paul Hollywood.
CT: Ah, but think of how you will have huge rippling muscles!
KM: Wow! I'm gonna be Katy O'Brian in no time!
CT: Paul warned the bakers to not underestimate the resting time for this bake.
KM: Yes, and that was in the notes your loving wife provided for us.
CT: How did you approach the rest phase?
KM: I looked at the time given to us (two-and-a-half hours). By the time I was done with my dough, I still had two hours and 15 minutes, so I asked myself what amount of time would make me stressed, and figured that had to be what Paul Hollywood had in mind, so I put my dough in the fridge and set a timer for one whole hour. How did you approach the resting? Also did you put your dough in the fridge? I don't know if that was right.
CT: I don't think I had quite as much time as you did, but I had a lot of time. I should've used a timer but I did not. I just wrapped my dough in cling wrap and stuck it in the fridge. Then a little while later, while I was worrying that actually I could not describe why it should be cold, I moved it once more, to the countertop next to the fridge.
KM: OK, see, this was a big question I had: whether it should be in the fridge or on the counter. Because the instructions said "lukewarm" water, and because there was no yeast, I assumed it should not be proving in any way. But mostly I put mine in the fridge to gain counter space if I'm being totally honest.
CT: From the recipe posted to the show's website, it appears that refrigerating was the right move. I still cannot explain why that should be the case, but there's evidently science taking place in that cold dark space.
KM: Yeah, it's not my business what's happening in the fridge when the door is closed! Good luck to all my dough.
CT: I would like to note, here, that however long my dough was not in the fridge, I did not notice any issues with elasticity or texture. Maybe my kitchen is just very damn cold now. It does feel pretty chilly.
KM: My dough always kind of looked like pizza dough if you made it with dead yeast, which I have unfortunately done several times.
CT: Yes! I had a similar thought, that I could pick it up and toss it like a pizza dough. Che bello!
I think my dough was probably resting for maybe a little bit more than an hour, by the end, although some of this had to do with some distressing issues I ran into during the rest, which prevented me from progressing with any kind of real intention.
KM: Shall we begin to discuss the filling, then? The mess of Paul Hollywood’s recipes returning to haunt us?
Stage Two: Making Spanakopita Filling
CT: I did not expect to run into any issues with the filling. This is the kind of cooking that everyone does all the time, just throwing aromatics into hot oil and then stirring stuff around until doneness has been achieved.
KM: I want to admit something up top here, which is that I believe Paul Hollywood to be a perfectly good baker, who is rather talented, but do not respect him as a cook. I do not respect white British people in general as cooks. Even the most opulent English dinners I've eaten in London have been undersalted. So from the get-go, I was ignoring this recipe. I was making my own filling the way I preferred.
CT: Whereas I am a compulsive recipe-follower, most of the time. I definitely wanted to stick to Paul's recipe, at least closely enough that I could hold him accountable in the blog for the finished product. Unfortunately it was not to be, as I learned as soon as I weighed the spinach and realized that I had like 130 grams, total, of roughage.
KM: It was a quite ungodly amount of spinach to weigh so little. I have a photo.
When I weighed the spinach was the first moment I became consumed with rage. I was so angry at Paul Hollywood. Nine hundred grams of spinach is just way too much. We would have needed like six of those clamshells!
CT: Right, this would've meant presenting to a cashier a truly eye-popping volume of baby spinach. I have a reputation in the community to uphold!
I hunted around in my fridge for backup greenery, but all I had was some badly wilted bok choy and a cabbage in the back of my vegetable drawer that may truly have been purchased a year ago.
KM: I had the same instinct! I had some swiss chard that I want to put into chickpea stew for dinner this week, so I was really reluctant to use that, and then when I weighed it, it was only 100 more grams of greens, so I decided to keep that for dinner.
I also found a wilted red cabbage in the back of my vegetable drawer from god knows when. But I operate under the belief that cabbage is fine to eat whenever, and when I weighed it, the little cabbage head was 700g, so that felt like fate.
CT: Dang! That's a friendly universe taking matters in hand.
While I was flailing around in a temper tantrum about the spinach situation, I realized that I also needed to season the pasta maker, and that this would mean making a second batch of dough during the rest phase. I had anticipated this during the leadup to the bake, but I guess I had expected to have things more under control during the middle part of the challenge. Instead I was already a huge anxious mess.
KM: Wait, sorry, I'm an idiot, but what does this mean, "season the pasta maker"?
CT: So, the first time that you use a brand new pasta maker, you are advised to run some waste dough through it for a few cycles, to pick up any granules of industrial crap stuck inside the machine.
KM: "Waste dough?" This is not a thing. No one has this. What in the nonna mondo is this?
CT: Just some extra dough, some dough you are willing to throw away.
So in this case I put flour and water into a bowl, mixed it together by hand, and kneaded it for a couple minutes to make it elastic, and then ran it through the machine a few times. This was also helpful for getting me reacquainted with a kitchen device that I have not used since I was in my twenties. Ideally I would not have done this mid-bake, but it was all that timing would permit.
KM: Wow! So you made a BONUS dough! Were you happy to be reunited with the pasta maker?
CT: I was! I'm glad it's here, ultimately, and I look forward to using it for cooking projects significantly less STUPID than this one.
How did your spinach-and-cabbage filling work?
KM: Well, I made the onions beautiful and added the garlic. It's funny how much more confident I feel cooking than baking. I was just vibing. My music was on. I was happy. I put the cabbage in first because it's harder, and cooked it for a while, adding salt. I ignored Paul Hollywood and added more spices (cumin, saffron, pepper). Then I added the spinach in many batches.
At this point, I realized that everything inside the pan was very wet. The spinach released a lot of water, and the cabbage released a lot of water, so once everything was done cooking, I decided it needed to dry off. So I squished it in the colander, and then I laid it out on paper towels.
It was so wet! I ended up using almost a whole roll of paper towels trying to get this stuff dry. I hated this part because I hate using paper towels and think they are wasteful and bad!
CT: This was a good move, I think. It did not occur to me, but then I was using a truly hilariously tiny volume of spinach for the bake.
I wound up using really a gargantuan volume of herbs, I think in part because the mixture was so pale in color from being out of proportion that I simply needed it to become more green.
KM: Despite having a full pan of cabbage and spinach, I ended up with only maybe two scant cups of cabbage and spinach and onions once it was all dry. So I also ended up chopping probably half a cup of dill and parsley, and mixing everything together in a big bowl with the feta. I also only used egg white instead of a whole egg to mix into my filling because I have 18 egg whites in a container from last week's ice cream disaster.
CT: Look at you! That was another savvy improvisation. You were truly master of your kitchen for this phase, whereas I was Whimpering Baby.
KM: I also tasted my filling and it needed more salt, but once I added even more salt, it tasted good, so I figured worst case, I could eat the filling out of my bake and cry.
CT: My filling also tasted fine, although possibly only I could enjoy it, as a true herb freak.
KM: I love herbs so much, though. I think you were right. This is honestly a great way to use a whole head of cabbage and a lot of herbs. The rest of the bake, I don't fucking know, man.
CT: I think the only other thing I did during this phase was melt some butter and separate an egg yolk, but my experience of this section of the bake was that I was drowning.
KM: I melted my butter in the microwave. Sometimes I get so mad during the bakes that I ignore my own opinions. For example, I don't like paper towels and I don't like microwaves. And yet here I was using both! When the timer went off for my dough in the fridge, I I realized that we did not have very much time to assemble, and panicked. I assumed that the bake would need at least 40 minutes. And when the dough came out I had an hour and 10 minutes left. So that's only 30 minutes to build the whole thing! At this point my hands began to shake and my body filled with dread.
CT: I sincerely think I had mentally given up on this challenge long before I handled my dough again. The spinach deficit sapped my spirit, and the wrangling of the pasta maker filled me with dread.
KM: How little filling did you actually end up with? Like how much stuff was in the bowl?
CT: Well, a possibly stupid thing that I did to make up for my lack of spinach was to cook it less, so that it would not wilt as much and I would preserve the volume. So in the bowl I had probably almost two cups of matter, but a lot of it was just the excess water of the spinach, which should've been cooked out.
KM: Oh no! Now I'm understanding what is to come. Because there is extra water in the spinach which should have been sopped up with five hundred paper towels that had to be thrown away, and which instead was inside your dough!
CT: Right. And, as it turned out, this was the very least of my troubles.
KM: Oh no.
Stage Three: The Dreaded Pasta Maker, Filling and Rolling Spanakopita
CT: We have arrived in hell.
KM: Did your dough look any different when it was time to use it? Mine, I swear to god, looked identical to before. And this made me feel insane. I don't understand science!
CT: No, it looked the same. Obviously it had not risen. I think I could feel that it was somewhat less stiff than it had been in the beginning, but possibly I was just imagining this effect. At any rate, there wasn't time to really ponder this situation. I had about an hour left on the clock, and I had to roll out five sheets of phyllo, fill it, roll it into a tube, shape it into a spiral, and get it into the oven. I knew that I was in so much trouble, but somehow it was even worse than I feared.
KM: Even though everything was going okay for me, I was so angry at this point. I finally read the instructions about how we had to make a log and spin it into a spiral right before I took my dough out of the fridge, and this infused me with rage. The whole time up until then, I thought we were just making lovely normal spanakopita, not a terrible spiral of doom. Once I knew the truth, I no longer had patience. I had only anger.
CT: If our readers could see me right now, they would notice that I am visibly quaking with anger just remembering how this stage went.
I measured the weight of my dough on the scale, did some math, and started dividing the dough into five parts. This turned out to be trickier than I expected, and also because I am a neurotic perfectionist I could not allow myself to have more than a gram or two of deviation per ball, so I lost a stupid amount of time here.
KM: Every day, I understand that guy who threw his cake into the trash on the show more and more. There's something about being angry and being in the middle of this bake that turns you back into a teen.
CT: I really thought about quitting, at a couple of different stages. Honestly what stopped me was the memory of that guy, and his shame.
KM: The amount of spite in my heart was staggering. I too remembered his shame. But in my fury, I was like, "I am not measuring this dough and doing math to get it in five equal pieces! Paul Hollywood can eat my ass!" I just eyeballed the ball of dough and cut it with a bench scraper and deemed that good enough.
CT: I used a roller to flatten the first dough ball, and then ran it through the pasta maker on the widest setting. My practice, back when I used to do this, was to go for two passes per setting, using gravity on the second pass to produce a thinner sheet. But this is obviously a slow way to proceed, and I am incredibly out of practice, and so really what I was doing was hemorrhaging time and creating a sloppy mess and losing my cool.
KM: I also did that! My pasta maker, which I love very much, also likes to have the dough ball go through each setting twice! So I was just doing that by instinct. I did it the very slow way. Also, I should note here that unlike the contestants on the show we were using hand-crank machines. So we could only use one hand to feed the dough into the machine, and keep it straight and make sure it wasn’t getting all weird and shitty.
CT: Right, I mean that was a clear disadvantage for the Defector idiot bakers. After I'd run my first dough ball through the machine on the thinnest setting, I discovered that it was not close to long enough or wide enough. So I ran it through again, really letting gravity do the thinning, whereupon I discovered that I had created a length of dough that was approximately twice the desired length, and roughly the width of a tube sock. This was a nightmare.
KM: My pasta maker has 10 settings. I was also having the same problem. I did not know how long 90 centimeters was but I've taken to converting centimeters by just dividing the number in half and making it a little smaller, so in my heart I believed I was looking for dough that was three feet long and as wide as a piece of paper. Using one of the higher settings, I had dough that was three feet long according to the piece of butcher paper that I eyeballed to be the length I thought I was going for. At this point the dough was not thin enough and was too skinny, so I had the same problem as you.
I used my hands to pull the dough apart and make it wider. This worked fine. I was kind of stunned by this because I don't understand science, so I really don't understand how the dough became so stretchy! It felt like magic.
CT: I made strudel last year, on a whim, so I had some experience with the very fun and surprising stretching capacity of a really elastic pastry dough. But I also did not have any time at all to add hand-stretching to this task: I was having a hard enough time just getting my sheets of dough through the machine and out onto the counter without twisting into an unrecoverable knot. Things almost could not have been going worse.
KM: I genuinely think if this had been a three-hour bake, this part would have been enjoyable. But I had set timers to go off every 10 minutes so that I knew where I was in space and time and every time one went off, I felt an infinite spike of stress.
CT: Yes! I also think if it'd been a three-hour bake we would've had the option of trying it manually, without the pasta machine! It's great fun to roll and stretch a huge sheet of tracing-paper-thin elastic pastry dough!
KM: I liked the pasta machine because I'm kind of bad at using the rolling pin, I've realized. I think it's something about the counter height that makes it hard for me to get leverage. The hand stretching was really enjoyable for me but I had to do it so fast! And then I was just putting it on my parchment paper which was dusted with cornstarch. I don't know why I did this except that it said cornstarch in the ingredients and I didn't know what else to do with it.
CT: Ha, I totally forgot about the cornstarch. I just used a couple pinches of flour. I am realizing as we go through our experiences how much of this bake I did incorrectly. And yet I am still mad at Paul.
KM: Cornstarch is a mysterious ingredient to me. I don't really know what it is, and only ever use it for making things thicker. Truly, making this a spiral is insane and Paul Hollywood should be blamed at every single turn. It's a flawed premise!
CT: Because my first phyllo was so long and narrow, I had to try to match the subsequent phyllo to this really stupid and improbable shape. You can imagine how fun it is to try to keep a five-foot length of paper-thin dough from sticking and twisting as it comes out of a pasta machine that you are cranking with one of your two hands.
KM: Another problem here is just that we don't have work benches. No spot on my counter is larger than 18 inches long. I guess I could have used the table, but I have stuff on there!
Also I used so much butter. I was swiping the butter in between the phyllo layers, and the ingredients said 100 grams of melted butter, but I had used all the butter by the third layer, so I just used more. It felt like more butter was better than less butter.
CT: Oh yeah, I used way more than the 100 grams of butter. I truly might have used like 300 grams by the end.
KM: OK, that does make me feel better. This bake was filled with surprises for me, and one of them was that once all my five sheets were stacked and butter-kissed together, I could stretch them even more! So I just used my hands to pull them even wider than before! In the end, I ended up with a big ole sheet of dough.
CT: By the time I'd rolled out my five sheets and they were all buttered and stacked, I knew that I was completely doomed. I think I had a total of 30 or 35 minutes left, and I hadn't even started filling the stupid thing, let alone shaping it into a spiral. I had so little time that I had no choice but to be fast and sloppy, and even then I probably would not have enough time for a full bake. Had I not been glowing with rage I almost certainly would have been openly weeping.
KM: The 10-minute timer alerting me that there were 50 minutes left went off when I was stretching my dough wider. This felt bad! Also for some reason my Spotify began playing Dido's "White Flag" and this felt like a terrible omen.
CT: How'd you do at the filling and spiraling?
KM: I went so fast on the filling. I just grabbed it with my hands (my kitchen; my rules; my sanitary guidelines). I squeezed it into log like shapes and lined them up on the dough in a nice long horizontal line.
It was uneven, but I did not have time for this. I also had no extra filling, so there was nothing to do about it. I then rolled it as fast as I could and shoved it into the pan. At this point I remembered I needed an egg yolk and sesame seeds, so I did both of those things.
But guess what, Chris?
CT: Let's hear it!
KM: I did not preheat the oven. At no point did I turn the oven on!
CT: Oh my god! No!
KM: So I turned the oven on at 500 degrees and shoved my pan in there, and then set a timer for 15 minutes and turned it down to 425. It went in the oven with 43 minutes left.
CT: I am so impressed that you had as much time as you did at the end of this bake. Things got away from me during the middle phase and I never recovered. I had to do my filling fast and sloppy, and in a line that was like three times too thick.
I could not afford to do anything a second time or to fine-tune anything, at all.
KM: How wet was your dough at this point? I'm very concerned about the spinach situation.
CT: The dough didn't feel very wet, but the filling was so wet. Rolling it and making it into a spiral revealed just how completely pointless it was to even bother cooking the stupid thing, and I knew that as soon as the heat got to it in the oven it was going to be like a boiling river inside of a loose and incomplete sheath of dough.
But there was nothing to be done: At this point I barely had enough time left on the clock to even get my spanakopita warm, let alone fully baked.
KM: Noooooo!
CT: My oven was at least preheated to 400 degrees. I wiped the awful mess down with butter and egg yolk, sprinkled sesame seeds and salt over the top, and threw it into the oven.
I bumped the heat up to 450 in the stupid hope that at least I'd get some color onto it, for the sake of photography. What a disaster.
Stage Four: Baking
CT: So you had 43 minutes to bake? I think I had like 23.
KM: Twenty-three is not enough, in my opinion. At the 20-minute mark I smelled smoke, so I opened my oven. This was because despite using 800 rolls of paper towels, there was still liquid inside my filling which was seeping out and onto the floor of my oven and catching on fire!
CT: I had this same issue, a pool of runoff collecting at the bottom of my oven. Disheartening and disgusting.
KM: Yeah, I cannot wait to spend my Sunday cleaning that!
CT: Love for the next dozen things I bake to smell like charred garlic.
KM: Literally! But at 20 minutes, my bake still looked slimy. Did you end up pulling yours out on the timer? Did you put it back in? What happened?
CT: So I spent the rest of the time cleaning my kitchen, which was in hellish condition despite this bake including a very long rest phase in the middle. I pulled my spanakopita inside of the final minute of the timer. It in fact did have some browning on the top, but it was clearly way underbaked. Just a disgusting melty blob. Horrible. Tragic!
KM: I would like to say I spent the rest of my time cleaning, but I did something even more insane. I was so angry about the spanakopita, and even more angry at the idea of not having something delicious to eat that I made Deb Perelman's Banana Bread while my spanakopita baked. The bread, I knew, would not hurt me, and also I had some dying bananas.
CT: That's baking hero shit. Stunting on the other bakers by whipping up a batch of homemade banana bread mid-bake.
KM: Making the banana bread, unfortunately, made me more angry, because it is such a simple and delicious recipe. We never get to make simple and delicious recipes. Everything we make is a weird snail of spanakopita envisioned by a demented man who hates us!
The Finished Product
CT: I hate even to confront the results of this challenge, but: How'd your spanakopita turn out?
KM: Unfortunately for my haters, my spanakopita is a beautiful golden girl filled with delicious filling that I made up. Look at her:
CT: I know that it is entirely irrational to be angry at really anyone except myself right now, but I am so angry at you for this.
KM: I'm so sorry. I would also be very mad at me, as I have been very angry at you in the past (caterpillar). I'm truly sorry to ask how your spanakopita turned out, but I must.
CT: It was a piece of FILTH. Behold!
What you cannot detect from this photo is that the bottom is also charred with runoff from the filling. The worst goddamn thing ever made.
KM: Oh NOOOOOOO! How did it merge together like that!
CT: God knows! It for sure was still raw enough to melt into terrible new shapes.
KM: Did you put it back into the oven after the timer went off, or did you leave it to its fate?
CT: I did put it back in the oven. I had to go pick up my daughter from daycare, but I set a timer that is magnetized to the front of my refrigerator, moaned a word of warning to my wife, and ran the hell out of there, as one does from a crime scene.
It eventually cooked to a deeper brown, but also the underside continued to char due to the vile slimy runoff. Even after the second stint in the oven, it was basically an inedible mess. I cut a slice out of it, took two bites, and hurled the entire thing into a pail on my porch that I use for kitchen scraps.
KM: Stupid char! My spanakopita turned out beautiful, and sorry to say that I made a little yogurt sauce and ate it for dinner. I'm Paul Hollywood now!
CT: Better you than the literal Paul Hollywood! He and I are enemies now!
Frankly, if you outbake me this decisively again, you and I will become enemies!
KM: It's fair, and I would never, ever do that, but I must remind you of the caterpillar. We are even, in my opinion. I will never forget the misery I felt when I saw your caterpillar legs were actual colors.
CT: Hmm, I think you are possibly overstating the virtues of my own caterpillar, which was distinct from yours mostly for having actual colors, but was an inedible piece of shit.
KM: We cannot allow the dreaded Paul Hollywood to turn us against one another. We must remember who our enemy REALLY is.
CT: The real enemy is my oven. Also the British.
KM: Yeah! But you know what, at least you got a new pasta maker out of it! Maybe you can use it to make something not stupid as hell.
CT: That's right! Truly I do feel pretty happy about that.
KM: Luckily, we are moving on next week to something simple and easy and a breeze and … oh wait. Sorry, that's not right.
CT: Uh-oh.
KM: Next week is … Autumn week? I'm sure whatever that is, we will nail it.
CT: I'm going to bake a pile of leaves until it is aflame, and then I am going to throw myself into it.
