Green vegetable pie (Torta verde)
Green vegetable pie (Torta verde) - a recipe from Liguria
ingredients
1st dough
- 250 g flour type 00 (pizza flour)
- 1/2 cup of water
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- salt
2. Vegetable abundance
- 200 g zucchini, young, green, cleaned and diced (about 1/2 cm)
- 400 g of chard or spinach, without stalks, finely chopped
- 1 bunch of parsley, smooth-leaved, without stems, finely chopped
- 1 medium onion, finely diced
- 1 garlic clove, finely diced
- 4 eggs
- 3-4 tablespoons freshly grated Parmesan, gladly more
- Salt, pepper, nutmeg
preparation
- Sift flour on a board, place in a well of oil, salt and water, and knead into a uniform, not too dry or sticky dough. When wrapped in a damp cloth let rest while preparing the vegetables.
- In olive oil, sauté the onion and garlic, do not brown. Add the chard leaf strips and diced zucchini and also fry. Transfer to a bowl and allow to cool slightly. If a lot of liquid has formed, it must be poured off, possibly the vegetables are still expressed. Add the eggs, parsley and Parmesan cheese to the vegetables and season with salt, pepper and nutmeg.
- Divide the dough, one part should be slightly heavier than the second part. Roll out the heavier part of the dough so that the bottom of a well-oiled tart or springform (about 28 cm in diameter) and the sides of the mold are covered and the dough over the top edge still about 1.5 cm dough. Roll out the second part of the dough to a plate the size of the bottom of the baking pan.
- Pour the vegetable mixture into the baking tin on the bottom plate, smooth it, place the second plate over it, lightly press it onto the vegetables. Press the edges of both dough plates together. In the upper dough plate with a fork pierce holes, then brush with olive oil.
- Bake in the oven at 180 to 200 ° C for approx. 45 minutes (circulating air). In between, brush the surface again with olive oil, which makes the vegetable cake crispy.
Tips
If you do not want to bother with the dough, you can remove puff pastry from the fridge. This gives the vegetable pie a lot of similarity to the Ligurian Easter cake, in which up to 33 finely rolled out dough pieces (which symbolize the death of Jesus) with the vegetable layer in the middle of the Torta pasqale is built. In addition, this Easter cake is still enriched with 8 raw eggs, one of which is placed in a hollow in the vegetable fullness, before the top sheet is spread over it. When the tortilla is divided into eight portions, there is one (cooked) egg in each serving, the symbol of life and resurrection.
The vegetable filling can be modified, you can take artichokes (a very fine variety), leeks, broccoli as a vegetable and borage as a herb, but should mix no more than two different vegetables with an herbal ingredient, otherwise a messy mess arises.
In Emilia Romagna, small chopped bacon is added to the chard, and in Trentino, steamed, crushed potatoes are processed with artichokes or chard into the fullness of the vegetables.
My personal variant is chard or spinach and dried tomatoes, cut into strips. This is not pure green, but very spicy.
Good Appetite!
