Fatayer Sabanekh (فطاير سبانخ) is the Lebanese spinach hand pie: a soft dough turned around a tart, herb-flecked spinach filling and baked into a sealed triangle you eat out of hand. It belongs to the wider fatayer family, but the spinach version is the one most people mean by the word, and the angle is the seal and the sourness. The filling has to be bright with lemon and sumac and bound tight enough that the pastry closes cleanly; the dough has to bake through without going dry. Get those two right and you have a self-contained savory pastry with a clean acidic edge. Get them wrong and you have either a soggy seam that bursts in the oven or a dry shell wrapped around a damp, under-seasoned center.
The build starts with the spinach, and the spinach starts with water management. Chopped spinach is salted and left to weep, then squeezed hard, because any liquid left in the leaf will steam inside the dough and split the pie. The wrung spinach is tossed with finely diced onion, lemon juice, sumac, salt, olive oil, and usually a scatter of pine nuts, sometimes with a little chili or pomegranate molasses pushing the tartness further. The dough is a plain enriched bread dough, rolled thin and cut into rounds; a spoon of filling goes in the center, and the round is folded up into a three-cornered seam, pinched firmly so it stays shut. The classic shape is a tight triangle with the seams meeting at a peak. Baked hot until the dough is set and lightly colored, the result should be a pastry that holds its shape, releases steam through a tight seam rather than a blowout, and tastes first of lemon and sumac, then of the green spinach behind it. Sloppy execution shows immediately: spinach that was not squeezed leaks and steams the crumb, seams that were not pinched hard split open and spill, an over-thick dough goes bready and mutes the filling, and a filling short on lemon and sumac reads flat and wet rather than sharp.
It varies mostly by the dough thickness, the shape, and how far the acid is pushed. A thin, almost cracker-crisp shell makes it a snack pastry; a softer, breadier dough makes it closer to a stuffed bun. Some kitchens pull the sourness up with extra sumac and a hit of pomegranate molasses so the filling is genuinely tart; others keep it gentle and let the spinach lead. The same fold and the same dough carry the meat fatayer built on spiced lamb, the cheese fatayer, and the open-faced sfiha with its exposed meat top, but those are distinct enough to stand on their own rather than be treated here as footnotes to the spinach. What this one reliably delivers is a sealed, portable green pastry that tastes of squeezed spinach, lemon, and sumac, baked until the dough just sets around it.