A parent from our community generously donated two June smart ovens to us, so we thought we’d give baking a go this week. Just in time for Pi Day, students made galaktoboureko, or milk pie, from Greece, which is basically a custard made from semolina (not dissimilar in taste and texture to Cream of Wheat cereal) wrapped in many layers of buttered phyllo dough. Everyone had a lot of fun working with the tissue-thin sheets of phyllo. Because our class time doesn’t allow for the entire start-to-finish baking process, which involves letting the pie cool and drizzling it with sugar syrup, each class baked pies for the next day’s class. This means we had many slices to serve at the parent faculty club meeting on Tuesday night as well as to give away to the incredible teaching and support staff at Harvey Milk every morning this week.
The phyllo is very forgiving - if it tears, it just adds another flaky layer to the final result. I must say the pies the kids made were simple to prepare yet looked magnificent and tasted even better. Hooray for pi and pie!
