Morocco Starter – Bakoula Hand Pies

For the Moroccan starter, we looked into bakoula, which is a salad typically made from mallow. However, as we are not in Morocco, we substituted the mallow for chard. In terms of flavour and texture, mallow is said to be similar to spinach or chard, but we’d definitely be curious to try the real thing!

To build on the bakoula salad, we found an excellent recipe from My Moroccan Food for bakoula, feta and pine nut hand pies. After all, why just have a salad if you have the option to add cheese and pastry?!

There weren’t too many ingredients for this recipe, but the seasoning was definitely key in bringing out the Moroccan flavours — cumin and coriander doing a lot of the heavy lifting here.

The chard was wilted down and squeezed dry before being combined with crumbled feta, toasted pine nuts, garlic and the spice mixture to create the filling.

Once the filling was made, it was left to cool. This is also a great time to stop if you’re making these ahead of time — the filling keeps well in the fridge for a couple of days!

The shortcrust pastry was rolled out and circles cut, filled and folded into half moon shapes, edges crimped and then baked until golden.

These were packed with flavour and the perfect hand-held snack. A wonderful start to Morocco week!

Let us know if you give these a try.