Why is my cooked spinach so watery?

Spinach is over ninety per cent water in leaves so thin they have almost no structure. There is nothing to do about that except get the water out deliberately before the spinach goes anywhere near the rest of the dish.

Step by step

1. Buy far more than looks reasonable.Spinach loses around nine tenths of its volume. A 250 g bag serves one or two as a side, and a recipe calling for 100 g of cooked spinach needs the best part of a kilo of raw leaves. Frozen spinach is often the more sensible purchase for cooked dishes.
2. Wilt it fast rather than cooking it.Either put it in a hot dry pan in handfuls, turning as each batch collapses — a minute or two total — or pile it in a colander and pour a kettle of boiling water over it. Both are faster and cleaner than adding water to a pan.
3. Cool it enough to handle and then squeeze properly.Run cold water over it to stop the cooking and make it handleable, then press it hard against a sieve with the back of a ladle, or gather it in a clean tea towel and wring. You will get a startling amount of green water out. Most people stop at about a third of what they could remove.
4. Chop the squeezed ball before using it.Wrung spinach comes out as a dense compressed lump. Chop it through so it distributes rather than sitting in your dish as one green mass.
5. For a side dish, dress it after squeezing.Butter, olive oil, a scrape of nutmeg, garlic, lemon, cream. Adding these to unsqueezed spinach just gives you a watery sauce in the bottom of the bowl.
6. Treat frozen spinach the same way.Thaw it and squeeze it exactly as hard. Frozen spinach is already blanched and often already chopped, which makes it better value and less work than fresh for anything cooked — a pie filling, a curry, a lasagne, a dip.
7. Never put unsqueezed spinach into a baked dish.Quiche, filo pie, lasagne, gratin, stuffed pasta: the water has nowhere to go and it will pool in the bottom or make the pastry soggy. This is the single biggest cause of a wet spinach and feta pie.

Tips

• Keep the squeezed-out liquid if you are making a soup; it is intensely spinach-flavoured and there is no reason to lose it down the sink.
• Baby spinach and mature leaf spinach behave the same. Mature leaves have thicker stems worth removing; baby spinach does not.
• Spinach turns drab olive very fast because it is thin and acidic. Wilt it briefly and dress it at the last moment if colour matters.
• The metallic, teeth-furring sensation from spinach is oxalic acid. Cooking reduces it, and dairy — butter, cream, yoghurt — binds it, which is why creamed spinach and saag paneer taste smoother than plain boiled spinach.

If it doesn't work

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