Nick Bramham’s Spanakorizo
This vibrant Greek dish is a perfect minimum-effort, maximum-reward meal for sunny spring evenings. Recipe by Nick Bramham. Photos by Emli Bendixen.
Good morning and welcome to Vittles! Today, we are publishing Nick Bramham’s recipe for spanakorizo, a Greek spinach and rice dish that is regularly on the menu at Quality Wines.
Recently we published our spring recipe supplement, featuring seasonal soup recipes from three of our favourite food writers: Melek Erdal, Ixta Belfrage and Songsoo Kim. You can access these recipes and dozens more with a Vittles subscription, which costs £7/month or £59/year. Your subscriptions help to pay all our writers, photographers and illustrators at a fair rate.
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Spanakorizo, which literally translates as ‘spinach rice’, is a traditional Greek dish that you are unlikely to find in Greek restaurants, even in Greece (believe me, I’ve tried). It’s typically made at home – an everyday chuck-it-all-in-a-pot-and-forget-about-it kind of a dish, the gold standard of minimum-effort, maximum-reward cooking. Spring onions and garlic are softened in olive oil, then joined by rice, spinach and water and left to simmer gently while you potter about doing something else for an hour. You’ll return to a silky homogeneous risotto-esque mass, which you then spike with copious amounts of dill, lemon and black pepper.
Spanakorizo is a total godsend during this mercurial hot–cold period before the truly exciting spring produce (asparagus, broad beans, courgettes) peaks, when you’re craving something fresh and zippy but also soulful and comforting. I’ve been serving it at Quality Wines around this time for the past few years now, with barrel-aged feta crumbled over the top, a good glug of olive oil and our crusty house focaccia. While this is enough to satisfy most, it does also work well as a garnish for roast chicken, grilled pork chops or steamed fish. I’ll leave you with one piece of advice: do not be stingy with the lemon.
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Spanakorizo
Serves 2
Time ~1 hour