Ground Elder Pie (Spinach Pie) is a modern British wild food recipe for a classic puff pastry pie with a ground elder, spinach, cheese, garlic and egg filling. The full recipe is presented here and I hope you enjoy this classic Gibraltarian version of: Ground Elder Pie.
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Ground elder is my favourite wild green of the moment and almost as soon as I saw the recipe for torta di acelga from Gibraltar I knew that I had to prepare a wild food variant using Ground elder, a potherb and my favourite wild green of the moment.
Ingredients:
400g young ground elder leaves
200g fresh spinach
3 garlic cloves, finely diced
150g–200g hard edam cheese, grated
Olive oil, for frying
Salt, to taste
6–8 eggs (reserve one egg)
500g–700g puff pastry
1 Egg/100 milk (for the glaze)
Method:
Pre-heat your oven to 200°C.
Wash the ground elder, remove the stems then add to a pot of boiling salted water (this helps reduce the bitterness). Blanch for 2 minutes then drain and when it can be handled shred finely.
Combine the garlic and olive oil in a large saucepan over medium heat. Once the oil heats up and the garlic begins to cook, rip the spinach leaves apart with your hands and add them to the pot along with a generous pinch of salt.
Stir the spinach constantly until it wilts and reduces in size (you’ll find that it releases plenty of water) then add in the blanched and chopped ground elder. Fry this for several minutes until all the water evaporates. You can squeeze the spinach with a spoon to check.
When the spinach is cooked, remove it from the heat and mix it together with the grated cheese, then beat together 6-7 eggs and pour it into the spinach mix. Give it a thorough mix to make sure everything combines well.
Next, lay out the puff pastry for the outside of the torta de acelga. Cover a medium-sized oven dish with greaseproof paper and place a layer of puff pastry in the base of the dish (also covering the sides); fill with the spinach mix, make a little dip in the mix and crack an egg inside and cover the dish with a puff pastry lid. Brush the top pastry with some milk or a beaten egg and transfer the oven to bake at 180ºC for around 40 minutes to 1 hour, until the pastry is golden and puffed.
Once ready, remove from the oven and allow it to cool slightly before cutting into squares and serving.
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