Like practiced pizzaioli, cousins Valantis Koufoutakis and Cornelia Koufoutakis swung mounds of dough, spinning them side-to-side and above their heads, gently stretching and pulling with oiled fingers in a choreography of carbohydrates that worked the rounds larger and thinner, larger and thinner, until almost unmanageably billowing and nearly translucent.

The dance ended with sharp slaps as each smacked the now paper-like dough onto fat-slicked marble counters in front of them. They made the whole affair look effortless in the way only a quarter century of muscle memory could. They offered to let me try my hand; I declined, knowing I’d clumsily end up picking most of the dough out of my hair and off the floor.

Other than the rhythmic slapping of the dough, the cousins worked in silence in a flour-dusted room one floor above the bakery—Τó Néon μπουγάτσα—their fathers opened in 1970 just a few blocks from the Aegean Sea and its views of Mount Olympus. I was in Thessaloniki, a port city in northern Greece considered the country’s culinary capital.

That day, the cousins were making custard-filled bougatsa, one of the dozens of flaky sweet and savory pies for which the bakery is known. The dough they worked was the constant across all they served, a fresh phyllo with which they wrap all manner of fillings—fruits, meats, vegetables, dairy—in dozens of deliciously brittle, flaky layers.

Downstairs, we sampled a half dozen of their pies, some shaped as slabs, others rounds, some tidy triangular turnovers, others bulbous packets. The shape of each pie and how it was folded and filled determined its name more than the filling itself. It was all as confusing as it was wonderful.

But I cared about only one thing. Their spanakopita. Or rather, what I thought was their spanakopita.

Because while any visit to Greece naturally generates a ponderously, enviously long list of foods to sample, I was focused on just one. Spanakopita, the phyllo-wrapped feta cheese and spinach pie responsible for some of my most vivid childhood taste memories. I thought I knew it well. But as usual, I’d soon learn how little I understood.

THE FAMILY MYSTERY

My family always has been a culinary anomaly. Long before so-called “ethnic food” entered the white middle class American mainstream, my mother was taking Thai and Vietnamese cooking lessons. We made our own tofu, cured salmon, and were devouring hummus at a time when supermarkets sold it only as a powder to be reconstituted with water.

Sometime before the SnackWell’s era, spanakopita entered our lives. We have no Greek heritage and no one—including my mother—has any memory of how, where or from whom she learned to make it. As far back as any of us can recall, it already was woven into the food fabric of our family. We have made peace with the mystery of its place in our lives.

This is where I’ll probably lose most of you. My parents and I have been mostly vegetarian for most of our lives. And at some date as nebulous as our spanakopita’s origins, the dish supplanted turkey as the main for our Thanksgivings. Accompanied, mind you, by all the classic sides—stuffing, mashed potatoes, roasted squash and, of course, cranberry sauce.

You’d be surprised by how wonderfully that all works.

But the spanakopita I grew up with is wildly different than most I’ve encountered out and about in the world. Much of the spanakopita in the U.S. is what I called packet-style. That is, turnover-like squares or triangles of flaky phyllo with a layer of feta and spinach sandwiched in the center, a little fussy and fashioned seemingly to be eaten out of hand.

If that’s your thing, godspeed to you. It’s not mine. The phyllo steals the spotlight from the filling. The spanakopita my mother learned was assembled lasagna-like. Thin layers of phyllo brushed with olive oil and topped with a blend of spinach and feta studded with garlic, oregano, thyme and cumin. Layers repeated until the baking pan heaved under the weight.

It was substantial. It was rich and cheesy, yet also light and vegetal. It was, as far as I was concerned, the Platonic Form of spanakopita. And when I headed to Thessaloniki, I was determined to find one at least as good as my mother’s. And perhaps in the process learn a few clues about the dish so central to my family.

Except, it turned out that all these years what we’d been eating wasn’t actually spanakopita.

LOST IN TRANSLATION

Bougatsa To Neon did serve a spinach and did serve a spinach and feta pie, but it resembled nothing like what I’d grown up with. And even then, when I ordered it, it’s not what I received. That’s because spanakopita isn’t spinach and feta pie. And that was my first lesson along this confounding road. To understand, we need a brief Greek language lesson.

Spanáki is the Greek word for spinach. Píta is the Greek word for pie. Ergo, spanakópita is the Greek word for spinach pie, a dish in which no feta cheese is harmed in the making. Which is why, when I ordered spanakópita from the Koufoutakis cousins, I got a well-swaddled phyllo packet with spinach—and nothing but—inside.

When I asked about the missing feta , I was met with confusion. Did I mean spanakotirópita? That tiró—technically tyrí when used alone—makes all the difference. That means cheese. It turns out, the dish I grew up with actually was spanakotirópita. Who knew? Well, probably plenty of Greeks. But my French Canadian-Eastern European family—and plenty other Americans—clearly have been oblivious. So I asked to try their spanakotirópita, a word I still struggle to pronounce.

It came as a packet dense with the fresh phyllo the cousins spun upstairs. It was delicious! But it wasn’t the dish I was looking for. The packet assembly meant the dough, while lovely, created a high ratio of phyllo to filling, the latter for me getting lost in the mix. Also, it technically wasn’t even spanakotirópita; it was bougatsa, named for its packet-like shape.

As I ate my way across Thessaloniki, I’d find that Greek pie nomenclature can be a confusing matter for outsiders. Bougatsa and píta can take many shapes and sizes—sometimes quite similar—and can be assembled from multiple types of phyllo, some thicker, some thinner, some fresh, some dry as paper. So much so, one bougatsa might look nothing like another, or might look identical to a píta. In time, I gave up trying to understand and focused on tasting as many pies as I could.

THE SLAB SOLUTION?

Which is how I ended up at the home of Dora Papdopoulou in the hills north of the city. She and her mother-in-law, Daphne Tsingerliotsi, and aunt, Kalliopi Pantelopoulou, offered to teach me a host of classic Greek dishes, including a spanakotirópita they said was more in line with the one I knew. It was the version Tsingerliotsi learned from her own mother.

Their spanakotirópita was prepared lasagna-style as a slab in a deep, round baking pan. A promising start. And their filling was robust, built from more than a kilo of fresh spinach wilted down with onion, then stirred with eggs and generous heaps of crumbled feta, all sandwiched between layers of phyllo. But here, another Greek language lesson is warranted.

Phyllo translates as leaf, a reference to the stacking and layering of sheets of dough that occurs in most recipes. This seemed fine until I watched the women labor at making those leaves, rolling rounds of dough until about ⅛ inch thick, slathering them with butter, then stacking them, rolling them some more, buttering some more, stacking some more, on and on. That stack was set into the pan, then topped with the filling, then topped with another stack of dough.

The result was far closer to what I wanted—the ease of a lasagna-like slab spanakotirópita assembled in a deep pan. Also, it featured ample filling, giving the spinach and feta equal billing to the phyllo. But... That phyllo-making process was a dealbreaker. All that rolling and stacking turned what should be a simple assembly into a project piece.

Plus, the best spankapitas/spanakotirópita (call it what you will) I’ve eaten—and not just my mother’s—combined a generous spinach-feta filling with thin layers of phyllo that meld with it. Except the top layer of dough, that is. The top gets flaky and crackly, remaining light and almost ethereal. But Tsingerliotsi’s phyllo never was intended to be so thin, giving the finished dish more of an American pie-like texture. Closer, but still not quite what I was after.

Yes, I realized I could be seeking an elusive grail. But at this point, I was too deep to surrender.

BETTER AS BOUGATSA?

My inner Goldilocks finally was satisfied a few days later when I visited Kyra Sofi, a wedge of a bakery whose name translates as Grandmother's Kitchen. They specialize in dozens of varieties of bougatsa.

I explained my mission to Konstantinos Gravanis, the owner who based many of the shop’s recipes on the bougatsa prepared by his grandmother. He encouraged me to try his spinach and feta variation, technically not spanakotirópita, of course. I was game. What he described to me sounded an awful lot like the slab-style dish I’d grown up eating. And after all, is a duck not a duck if called something else?

Gravanis’ cooks were preparing a fresh batch as we spoke, creating lasagna-like layers in a deep, rectangular baking pan. Three layers of parchment-thin, dry phyllo (similar to what we would buy here in the U.S.) lined to bottom, just thick enough to create a crust without being dense. The layers in the middle were thin enough to give structure but not overwhelm the filling of heaps of spinach, onions and feta. Finally, a top layer just a few phyllo sheets thick, just enough to bake up crisp and flaky, without turning thick and chewy.

He cut me a slab from a bougatsa fresh from the oven. It tasted like home. Just enough dough to lend structure to all that spinach and feta. Just enough to create a satisfyingly crispy top layer without becoming heavy. Tons of filling. And the ease of simply layering it all in a large pan, one delicious stratum at a time. This was the spanakopita I knew.

Of course, it wasn’t spanakopita. Which made me consider: Is it possible my mother never learned spanakopita? Or spanakotirópita, for that matter. Perhaps lost in translation during the mystery lesson we’ve lost to time, she instead learned bougatsa?

I decided it didn’t much matter. Just as my family long ago made peace with the unknown, I accepted that this bougatsa/spanakopita/spanakotirópita I devoured standing on the street outside Kyra Sofi was precisely the version we needed at Milk Street. You are welcome to call it what you will. And perhaps even serve it with cranberry sauce and stuffing.

JM Hirsch

J.M. Hirsch is a James Beard Award-winning food and travel writer and editorial director of Christopher Kimball's Milk Street. He is the former national food editor for The Associated Press and has written six books, including “Freezer Door Cocktails: 75 Cocktails That Are Ready When You Are.”