Greek Bread and Bakeries
Greek Bakeries are wonderful places and the way to find them as you travel from village to village is to follow your nose or ask a local for the "foor-nos" or oven. Most villages of any size will have a central square with a bakery near by. Besides baking flour products for sale, the bakeries also have, for a small fee, a holiday tradition of cooking pre-made casserole dishes brought to the bakery by individual households (usually for large parties of visitors).
There are many styles of Greek bread to choose from and I think you will find that they are less expensive, about a euro a loaf, than what they cost back home. Your everyday loaves of bead are pictured left and can be round or rectangular.
Some styles are particular to a time of year or religious holiday to be exact. Arrive at the baker before ten in the morning and the bread may still be hot. Dark bread, Sour Dough & Rye breads or 'scissile' are difficult to find. Besides bread, many bakers also make a wide assortment of cookies and and bread sticks of which they're are far too many to really cover here. Some are sweet and some are salty. They are invariably sold by weight. Many larger bakeries also sell the items below.
Baked goods for 'breakfast' or a snack anytime
Tiropita (Cheese Pie)
This word is a composite of the Greek word for cheese (tiri) and pie (pita), though the latter has a wider meaning than the large round pie in the West, such as apple pie. The tiropita is a cheese pie made with either filo dough (thin pastry sheets that are layered after being brushed with oil or butter) or a heavier pastry dough, and cheese, often feta, but sometimes other cheeses, such as kasseri or kefalotiri, or some combination of such cheeses. The tiropita is usually round, and often large enough to fill one up until the midday meal. Tiropsomo is another variation of the tiropita, made with a heavier bread-like dough and hence with less fat that the tiropita made with filo dough.
Spanokopita (Spinach Pie)
Another favorite snack food/'breakfast' made will filo dough with a spinach filling, either in a pie form with wedges or rectangular pieces served, or twisted into rope like shapes (strifta).
The koulouri
This bread ring resembles a large soft bready pretzel, usually dusted with sesame seeds, and is usually quite tasty and also cheap. These are often sold in the streets of cities.
Some sweet pastries
Milopita
This is a small apple pastry, usually made with filo dough, but also with heavier pastry dough.
Bougatsa
This is a sweeter pastry, often eaten with coffee, made with filo dough and a custardy filling. Though most guide books describe it as a 'cream pie', the filling resembles custard more so, though made with less eggs than galaktoboureko (below) and hence less heavy. The flaky pastry is dusted heavily with powdered sugar and cinnamon.
Galaktoboureko
This pastry is also made with a heavy custardy filling, with up to ten eggs used, and though filo is used for the 'crust', the sugar syrup poured over it makes it a very moist affair.
Kree-seen-ya
Bread sticks like these pictured left, may also come with sesame seeds and in various widths and lengths - fattening but convenient and storable.
Black Bread
Most bakeries also sell 'mavro' (literally, 'black') bread, meaning wholewheat, though in many places good wholewheat flour seems to be unavailable, and they use a white flour to which bran has been added, never quite doing the trick, as the result is a bread with no density and almost no flavor. Breads made with 'prozimi' (starter), are however, far superior, and there are also the 'olikis' (wholegrain bread, made with various grains), and 'sikaleos', or rye bread. But the main staple, it should be repeated, is the white crusty village bread, which varies greater from place to place, and also from bakery to bakery within one town! This bread is served in a basket with every meal, at homes and tavernas or estiatoria (restaurants) both, and is commonly use to mop up the oil and/or sauces from the food, from salads dressed with lemon and oil (lemoni and ladhi) to mayeirefta (below), which are casserole dishes, always cooked in a generous quantity of olive oil along with whatever other ingredients are used.
Paximadia or Hard Tack
Foreigners must often wonder about he packages of dry crusty squares sold in the bread section of all the super markets.
These are 'Paximadia', dry rusks made from barley or whole wheat flour and baked twice. They are hard as rocks, and can actually keep for years. Water must be added to make them edible, and then they can be used just like bread.
A special dish made in Crete is the 'dhakos', made with moistened Paximadia topped with fresh chopped tomato and olive oil. Recently variations on this theme have emerged with softer paximadia easier on the teeth.
Paximadia go well as a road snack. 'Some tomato, some cheese, some wine'. Did you ever see "Sahara" with Humphrey Bogart? Remember Frenchy? Some Paximadia, some feta, some oil, some oregano and you're Greek stylin.