Method

1. Wash the fruits thoroughly and peel them with a sharp knife, trying to get a peel as thin as possible (without so much pith, which gives the liqueur its bitterness).

2. Put the ingredients in a glass jar, seal and steep for 20-25 days, gently shaking on a regular basis to help the sugar dissolve.

3. Using a double gauge filter the liqueur into elegant bottles.

Ingredients

1 litre tsipouro
½ litre brandy
6 cloves
3 cinnamon sticks
1 whole nutmeg
500g sugar
1 tangerine unwaxed (peels)
1 orange unwaxed (peels)
1 bergamot unwaxed (peels)

By Argiro Barbarigou

www.argiro.com.gr

We order it by the kilo and we can go through several kilos in an evening. Glasses are continually being refilled by each other without anything being said. It's like a reflex or second nature to fill your neighbors glass when you see it is empty. And when the carafe is empty someone at the table just lifts it in the air and catches the eye of a waiter, the busboy or even the owner of the restaurant and in thirty seconds it is full again.

Retsina is my preferred wine and once in awhile if you are lucky, that is what is available in those barrels. But many tavernas these days have turned away from retsina and are making excellent wines, often as good or better than any well known commercial bottled brands, though you can find yourself in a taverna where the barreled wine is awful. Most restaurants are proud of their wine though not all the restaurants make their own. Some buy it from distillers by the barrel or by large jug, and in some touristy restaurants homemade wine, or hima, as it is called, is not even available and you have to take your chances with the wine list.

Lately many restaurants have been buying bulk wine in boxes and filling the carafes from them. But before you get upset I want to reassure you that many of these boxed wines are pretty good and in some cases it is the same bulk wine the restaurants have always had, but now it comes in boxes. But walking into a restaurant and seeing barrels stacked is usually a sign that they make their own wine and you should try that first before you try any bottled wine they may have. But my rule is to always ask for local wine (doh-pio) and then ask for hee-ma or wine in a carafe (karafaki) and hope for the best. It is rare that I will get a house wine so bad that I send it back and order a bottle from the wine list, but it does happen. I always ask if it's good (eeneh kalo?) and they always say absolutely (veh-vay-os). But what else are they gonna say? It's terrible? There are also many farmers on the islands who are bottling their own wine and you can often find them in tavernas and in the various traditional shops, supermarkets and even in the bakery.

To read the rest of this post, please visit Matt Barrett's greecefoods.com

It may be a karpoozi (watermelon) or it may be a peponi (honey-dew melon) but you will look at your wife or husband or child and say "I had no idea something could taste this good and not be bad for you."

For some reason vegetables and fruits taste better in Greece than they do elsewhere. There are many theories of course. Some say it is the absence of pesticides.  I have a theory of my own. Greece is made up of mountains and valleys. The farms are in the valleys. The water rains on the mountains and washes minerals into the valleys. The more rich a fruit or vegetable is in minerals, the better it will taste. Of course I can't prove this and since many fruits and vegetables are now grown on large industrialized farms or even imported, without knowing what you are eating and where it comes from you have no way of knowing why it is good, or in some cases is not. Just because you may eat the best tomato or melon in your life during your stay in Greece does not mean that you will eat delicious vegetables rich in minerals at every meal at every restaurant. But I can say with confidence that those restaurants where the Greeks eat, great care is taken in choosing the fruits and  vegetables that are served that day.

The Greeks eat seasonally. Take the horiatiki salata or as we call in the USA and other English speaking places, the Greek Salad or Greek Village Salad. Anyone going to Greece in the summer will find delicious horiaktiki salatas that consist of fresh ripe red tomatoes, green peppers, onions, cucumbers, olives, a big hunk of feta cheese, extra virgin olive oil, oregano and if you are lucky maybe some capers! Not at every restaurant of course. You could go to some tourist joint that serves tomatoes that are closer to green than red, a smidgeon of crumbled feta and one olive, topped with whatever crappy oil they got a good deal on. But I am talking about a good honest Greek restaurant. If you eat a horiatiki salata in season you will eat them for the rest of your life. In fact you will start a garden so you can have tomatoes like the ones you had in Greece. Another salad you may not be familiar with is the Cretan or dakos, which is like a horiatiki on top of a paximadi, which is a dried hard bread, though once the olive oil and juices soak in it is not hard for long. It is delicious and healthy too.

But what if you are not there in the summer? What if it is late spring or fall or winter and you order a horiatiki salata? You don't. In the winter months (winter meaning any season that is not summer) you would eat a lachano-marouli salata (cabbage-lettuce salad). Or a lachano-carota salata (cabbage-carrot salad). Or a plain marouli (lettuce) salata.

To read the rest of this post, please visit greecefoods.com

By Matt Barrett

On that note, the thought of roasting a whole chicken mid-week makes me cringe.

There’s that cold squishy giblet bag, trussing string, cooking and resting time, plus all that carving? Way too intense for a Tuesday.

During the week I purchase my bird pre-cut. No giblet bag, no string, no carving. It cooks in half the time and yet still has that slow-cooked taste.

Ingredients

For the Chicken

1x 3-4 lb. roasting chicken, cut into pieces*
1 tsp. salt
½ tsp. black pepper

Marinade/Vinaigrette

2 tsp. lemon zest
¼ c. fresh lemon juice, about 2-3 lemons
1 tbsp. dried oregano
¾ c. olive oil
½ tsp. salt
3 sprigs fresh oregano
3 cloves of garlic, grated

On the side

1½ lbs. potatoes, skin on, cut into 1" chunks
2 tsp. olive oil
salt & pepper to taste

Salad

6 large handfuls of mixed lettuce
1 pint of colorful cherry tomatoes
½ c. feta cheese, crumbled

Garnish

2 lemons for roasting
fresh oregano sprigs

* Your cooking time will vary (+/-) depending on the size of your chicken.*Make sure to reserve half of the marinade for your vinaigrette. Do not use all of it on your chicken!

To read the rest of this recipe, please visit theclevercarrot.com

The frying has its tricks, too. I always fry in olive oil, fully aware that it is a luxury many cooks outside of olive-growing regions cannot afford. You actually don’t need that much oil for this recipe, as the keftedes, like most Greek fried foods, are pan-fried not deep fried. What you will need is to pay attention to the oil. It should not be so hot that the keftedes burn on the outside but remain undercooked within. You can also fry in pure olive oil, which retains some of the good qualities of EVOO and is a lot cheaper.

To read more, please visit dianekochilas.com

By Diane Kochilas

Greek cooks give loukoumades their distinctive shape by squeezing the very soft dough through their hands into the hot oil and turning the dough while it cooks until it is puffed and golden. Be very careful doing this as the hot oil may spit and there has been the odd report of an exploding loukoumada. Drain them on absorbent paper, drizzle them with honey – single-blossom is good for added flavour and fragrance – and scatter them with ground cinnamon for the traditional version of this luscious dish. Don’t stand on ceremony, either, waiting for the whole batch to cook. These little golden beauties are best served as hot as you can handle.

We’ve glammed our loukoumades up with wedges of photogenic (and tasty) figs and fragrant thyme leaves, but at their heart they remain the essence of simplicity. Simple, perhaps, but we’re betting you won’t be able to stop at one (or even two).

Ingredients

14 gr (about 2 sachets) dried yeast
300 gr (2 cups) plain flour, sieved
For deep-frying: vegetable oil
10 black figs, quartered

Honey and thyme syrup

360 gr (1 cup) Attiki or other Greek honey
110 gr (½ cup) sugar
1 lemon, thinly peeled rind and juice only
2 tbsp thyme leaves, plus extra to serve


METHOD

1. Combine yeast and 250ml warm water ina large bowl, stir to combine, then add 75gm flour, stir and set aside until foamy (5-7 minutes). Add remaining flour, 250ml warm water and a pinch of salt and beat with a wooden spoon until smooth and elastic. Cover and set aside until doubled in size (1-1½ hours).
2. Meanwhile, for honey and thyme syrup, combine honey, sugar, rind, juice and 125ml water in a small saucepan over medium heat, stir until sugar dissolves (3-5 minutes), then simmer until slightly reduced and syrupy (5-7 minutes). Remove from heat, cool slightly, add thyme leaves and set aside to cool to room temperature.
3. Meanwhile, heat vegetable oil in a deep-fryer or deep-sided frying pan to 180C. Spoon tablespoons of batter into oil, or squeeze them through your hands (be careful as hot oil may spit), and turn occasionally until golden and cooked through (3-4 minutes). Remove with a slotted spoon, drain on absorbent paper. Serve warm with figs, drizzled with syrup and scattered with extra thyme.


Note This recipe comes courtesy of Mary Loucas, mother of GT editor Anthea Loucas and is from the March 2010 issue of Australian Gourmet Traveller.

Serves 10

Cooking Time Prep time 20 mins, cook 25 mins (plus proving, cooling)

WORDS Emma Knowles RECIPE Alice Storey and Mary Loucas PHOTOGRAPHY Ben Dearnley STYLING Geraldine Munoz and Alice Storey

For more information, please visit Gourmettraveller.com.au

Ingredients

1 chicken, weighing about 1.4kg
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1 large buffalo tomato, sliced into 8 segments
1 large onion, sliced horizontally
2 tsp chopped oregano
2 tsp ground cinnamon
freshly ground salt and black pepper
cumin potatoes, to serve

For the village salad:

large bunch of coriander, trimmed and chopped
large bunch of flat leaf parsley, trimmed and chopped
large handful of Greek rocket
6 cherry tomatoes, chopped
sea salt
splash of extra virgin olive oil
squeeze of lemon juice

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C.

2. Place the chicken in a roasting pan. Rub with 1 tablespoon of the olive oil.

3. Arrange the tomato segments on the breast and legs. Split the onion rings and place all around the chicken

4. Sprinkle with the oregano and cinnamon, and salt and pepper.

5. Drizzle the remaining olive oil over the chicken. Roast for 1 hour and 30 minutes or until the juices from the thickest part of the thigh run clear when pierced.

6. Transfer to a warm serving dish and leave to rest for 10 minutes in a warm place.

7. To make the salad, combine the coriander, parsley, rocket and tomatoes in a serving bowl. Sprinkle with salt and just enough oil to coat the leaves. Toss briefly, then add a squeeze of lemon juice and toss again.

8. Serve the chicken with the salad and Cumin Potatoes.

uktv.co.uk

While there are as many methods for frying salt cod as there are cooks who fry it, skordalia variations tend to follow a regional vein. I have always been impressed by the wealth of regional expressions when it comes to this simple peasant dish, as well as to the ritual that often goes into its preparation.

Garlic, olive oil, and salt are the constants in all Greek skordalia recipes, but the base, acid, and consistency vary from place to place. Dried bread, boiled potatoes, and nuts, especially almonds, pine nuts or walnuts, may all be used as the base of this pungent specialty, either alone or together with stale bread or potatoes. One recipe, from the Peloponnese, calls for starchy chestnuts. Fresh lemon juice, fish stock or broth, and vinegar are the liquids that help balance the final flavors. At least one version, a traditional recipe of the Asia Minor Greeks, calls for pistachios; the skordalia of Nea Marmara in Halkidiki is made with feta and mint; one delicious, obscure recipe popular in the traditional shepherd’s cooking of the Greeks who came to Greece from the Black Sea, is made with almonds, yogurt and vinegar.

Connoisseurs of skordalia know that a certain ritual is part and practice of its preparation. I will never forget once walking in on an old caterer friend who was making skordalia for a party—by hand, potato by potato, drop by drop of olive oil, pinch by pinch of salt, in a mortar, pounding each potato with the pestle with zenlike rhythm. To this day, the mortar and pestle are the best tools for making skordalia because they allow for the control of speed with which one breaks down the starch in the potatoes or bread that most commonly make up the base. A food processor’s blade is too swift and violent and results in a gummy skordalia. Unless the potatoes are cold, which is the advice of the family fry master, who, between dipping chunks of salt cod in his secret batter and frying them with the patience of Jove, he also sometimes takes a stand near the mixer, making the dish in question. Cold potatoes don’t break down as easily, it turns out, as hot ones. But they also don’t absorb oil as easily.

Aliada

In the Ionian islands, skordalia is called aliada, clearly an Italian sounding word and once that evinces vincing the influence that 200 hundred or so years of Venetian administration over these islands brought to their cookery.

Perhaps nowhere is the certainty of ritual more obvious than in the old cooks of Cephalonia, where the island’s aliada is made with rules developed over centuries. Mortar and pestle are de rigueur, the vessel and mechanism by which the first steps in the making of skordalia are taken as the cook pounds garlic cloves and salt to a smooth paste. In a separate plate, traditionally made of wood or fired clay, she mashes boiled potatoes either with the pestle or with a fist-sized smooth stone. A pot nearby contains salt cod that’s been soaked and is now simmering to further desalt it. Its broth provides the gustatory undertones and depth of flavor in the final aliada and is added to the garlic and salt, to be followed by a few spoonfuls of partially mashed potatoes. Slowly, step by step and increment by increment, each of these ingredients is wedded to the final, smooth and silky potato-based aliada which is partnered with crispy fried salt cod or other small, fried fish.

By Diane Kochilas

dianekochilas.com