5 Cheese Greek Spiral

One of the newer products that we've seen at Trader Joe's is the 5 cheese Greek spiral ($3.99). We just bought this over the weekend at TJ's and weren't planning to eat it right away, but after we got it home in our cooler, we noticed that the package was coming open. Guess the glue wasn't that strong. Anyway, we thought it would be better to try this out sooner rather than later so the quality didn't degrade too much in the freezer from the package being a touch open, so it became part of our Monday night dinner.

According to TJ's blog post, this savory pie is based on a cheese pie native to the Kozani region in Greece and made in Thessaloniki. We haven't been to those areas, but we had lots of savory pies in Greece (at Ariston and plenty more in Santorini if we had ever gotten up to telling you about those in our recaps), including cheese pies that we really enjoyed. The 5 cheeses in this Greek spiral are gouda, kasseri, kefalotyri, semi hard cheese, and blue cheese. Not really sure what "semi hard cheese" is, but it was listed on the ingredient list in the same way. In case you're curious, the kasseri and kefalotyri are both sheep/goat cheese blends, while the other 3 are all made from cow's milk. 

The pie is very easy to prepare. You pull off the cover (which was especially easy for us since it was already coming apart), and the pie is already one large coil. Pop it into the oven at 375 degrees and bake until golden brown. The package said it would take about 30 minutes, but the TJ's estimates for baking things like this are always a bit low for us, so we ended up baking it for probably about 45 minutes.

The pie was really tasty. A little oily, but the cheese blend was good, and the outside filo was light and flaky as it should be. We probably could have just had this for dinner with a light salad on the side, since it's over 1,200 calories in this single coiled pie, but I didn't realize that when I paired this up with some crab toasts (challenge post coming soon). Oh well. It was filling, but the cheese flavor was really good.

Buy Again? Yes, it was good, so if we're in the mood for a cheese pie, we'll get one. Between the 2, I think we'd rather get the spinach and kale pie though, since that has lots of cheese flavor but is much more nutritious with all those greens.