Season 1 : Eating Europe

Episode 9

26 minutes – Crete Greece

A recent heat wave reminded me of the Greek food we learnt to love on our visit to Crete. You can learn more about where we went in my article on Which part of Crete is best to stay In this episode I talk about why the most traditionally Cretan dishes on the menu were the vegetarian ones, the stuffed courgette flowers at George’s taverna that no Michelin-starred kitchen could match for sheer beauty, and the courgette fritters I have been making ever since. We cover dolmades, the stuffed vine leaves popular in Crete; dakos, Crete’s answer to tomato bread; gemista, the stuffed vegetables baked with white wine and potatoes; and a tip about how to make the best tzatziki.

Transcript of The European Compass: A Food and Travel Podcast — Episode 9

Episode 9 transcript | The European Compass, Eating Europe series

Welcome to the European Compass Podcast, the podcast where we explore the heart of Europe through its food, its markets and the stories behind every dish. I’m your host Julia Doust, and if you’ve ever planned a trip around a meal then you’re in the right place. Let’s dig in.

So this week we are talking about Greek food, in particular Cretan food. In France we had a particular warm spell, and every time this happens since 2022 — so we visited Crete in 2022 — whenever there’s a heatwave warm spot we all look at each other and go let’s eat Greek, and it’s become our hot weather food. And there’d be certain takeaways that we had from this trip that have become part of our repertoire, and they’re not always the ones that you think they’re going to be. So when we first went to Crete I was imagining gyros, I was imagining Greek salads, these are the things that we would eat anyway and that I would eat if I went to a Greek restaurant, or lamb stews and things like this. And actually they weren’t the things that we enjoyed the most when we were in Greece, and they weren’t the things that we now cook whenever we say let’s cook Greek.

Makrigialos: Greece Without the Crowds

So we went to the southeast corner of Crete. Quite often when people travel to Crete they’ll travel along the north coast and they’ll go to Chania or they’ll go to Rethymnon, or they fly into Heraklion, and we did fly into Heraklion but we went further south, to east and south to a place called Makrigialos, which is a very sheltered bay with a row of tavernas and a beach, and it’s absolutely lovely. It’s totally idyllic. It’s not your picture postcard sort of idea of Greece in terms of Santorini — quite often when people think of Greece they’re thinking of this image of Santorini. It’s not quite like that but it is absolutely adorable, and whilst it is a tourist place, it’s a tourist place like it was in the 1970s, not a tourist place we imagine now. There’s not hordes of tourists, there’s a row of tavernas with their sun loungers out on the beach, and it’s just perfect.

So we stayed there — you can read about it on my site where I talk about where we stayed and everything else. The things that we were seeing: most of the restaurants have got similar menus, there’s all the usual, there are the moussaka, there are the gyros, there are quite a lot of seafood, obviously because we’re on the coast, a lot of octopus and gambas and things like this. One thing that was quite surprising about the area is there’s quite a lot of things like schnitzel on the menu. I think that’s just because there was traditionally quite a lot of German tourists, and so their influences come in, so you do get a lot of schnitzel and things like this.

And one thing that we noticed straight away, right from the first meal, was the vegetarian options. They weren’t classed as vegetarian options, but the options, the meat-free options, were far more traditional Cretan food than many of the meat options. And it’s as though — I hesitate to say locals, because I’m not sure how many Cretans actually go down to Makrigialos, I’m sure it is mainly a tourist resort — but the Cretan food and the roots of their food have stayed within the vegetable options that are on offer, more so than the meat options.

George’s Taverna and the Dish I Still Cook at Home

So our favourite place to eat was this place called George, George Taverna, and it wasn’t actually in the main part of Makrigialos. We had to walk around a headland, and you came to another beach where there really wasn’t very much else. There was just this one taverna with some seats outside, typical sort of blue chairs, blue wooden chairs with tables, and then out to the beach. Quite rustic, this is nothing posh about this place. It’s a rustic place that feels like it hasn’t changed in decades, I’m sure it probably hasn’t.

Normally when I travel I avoid places that have got photographs of food. In Crete we did find that a lot of the restaurants did have photographs of food, so it’s actually quite difficult to say OK, I’m not going to eat at them. And particularly when we first went to George, it was because we’d walked around the headland and we’d seen this taverna and there wasn’t anywhere else to eat, so you’re like well look, we’ll eat there, it’ll be fine. And actually it was more than fine, it was fantastic. And he came out, George himself came out and talked to us, and he talked about his mum being in the kitchen and all these recipes that he’d learnt from his grandma, and that this was very much the way of cooking, it was their food, that they used olive oil from a local farm, and that everything was just local, it was all just what they could find at the market and what they knew how to cook and that they’ve been cooking forever.

My absolute favourite dish there was the stuffed courgette flowers, which were just beautiful. No Michelin starred restaurant can ever come up with something quite as beautiful as just a simple courgette flower stuffed, and they were so tasty. And that’s something I have tried since, but courgette flowers — we grow courgettes so I can get courgette flowers, but they’re quite precious, because if you pick the courgette flowers then you won’t get the courgettes. So we avoid picking the courgette flowers. But I would eat them if I went back there, definitely.

Courgette Fritters: The Real Takeaway

But the courgettes then — I should say zucchini but we use the French term courgette — the courgettes are then grated and fried and made into a courgette fritter, and that is the takeaway, that is the thing that we now cook on a regular basis. My daughter’s recently turned vegetarian and these are the ultimate vegetarian food. You can put them on a plancha, we cook them, reheat them, so prepare them all in advance and then reheat them on the plancha.

I’ll take you through: the easiest way to do it is to explain how to make them. So you take your courgettes and you grate them on a coarse grate — I do it in a magic mixer. And then you salt them and you leave them for a good half an hour to get those juices out. And then this is the important step, which when we first got back from Greece it took us a while to get this step right. So you take the grated courgette, you put it inside a tea towel, and you squeeze until you have squeezed all the water out, and you keep squeezing and keep squeezing and keep squeezing. Amazing the amount of water that comes out of these. I’m sure that the restaurants in Crete must have some sort of press that does this, because they can’t be turning it in a tea towel every time. They must have some sort of press that they turn around to squeeze all the liquid out of the vegetables.

And once you’ve done that, you then mix it in with some onions and oregano and some feta — feta’s very important — a bit of egg, and you mix it all up and you get quite a slack mixture. And again this is the mistake I made when I first started making them, is that I was trying to then form them into some sort of patty to then fry, and it wasn’t working. And then I realised actually what you need to do is just scoop it out with a spoon and drop it onto the pan, hot pan, loads of oil. Do not skimp on the olive oil here, this is an important step. Hot pan, loads of oil, scoop out the courgette mix in just a spoonful, drop it into a bowl, and then as it starts to cook on the bottom then you can press it down and press it down into the patty, and once the bottom’s cooked it’ll flip, it’s not a problem. But trying to shape it before it goes in the pan, it’s not worth it.

So courgette fritters were the absolute main thing that we came away from.

Dolmades: The Grandmother’s Recipe

So lots of other things that we enjoyed eating there. The stuffed vine leaves, so they’re called dolmades — dolmades, I’m probably pronouncing that wrong — the stuffed vine leaves, you find them all over Greece and Turkey, probably brought to Greece by the Ottomans, and then there was a bit of a revival after the Greco-Turkish war back in the 1930s when a lot of people with Greek origins moved back to Greece, and they brought these dolmades with them. The Cretan version is simpler than you might find elsewhere. This is basically rice and a few other ingredients wrapped inside the vine leaves. Elsewhere you might get them with minced meat and things like that inside them. These ones were — there really wasn’t any meat inside, this is a vegetarian type dish, just rice and the vine leaves and then the flavour of broth.

George was saying that this was his grandmother’s old recipe and that she’d been making this forever. What I didn’t realise at the time is that the rice isn’t cooked in advance. So the rice is wrapped up raw inside. So you take rice, you add in onions and tomatoes, oregano of course, and you wrap spoonfuls of this rice inside vine leaves that have been blanched. So vine leaves, they’re just leaves from a grapevine that have been blanched to soften them and take the bitterness out of them. You then take the rice, put it inside the vine leaves, and fold it all up to make a little parcel. And then these little parcels are placed in the bottom of a dish, so you fill the bottom of a dish with these little parcels, you then take your broth or your stock that you’re using and you pour it over, and place a plate or something on the dolmades so that they don’t unwrap, and then you cook them for about half an hour, 40 minutes in the stock. And of course the rice then puffs up and expands and cooks, and makes these adorable little cigar rolls. And they’re just the perfect starters when it’s hot.

There’s something about Greek food in the sunshine, but I think this is why we didn’t eat the meat products so much. I think the meat and the lamb stews and things like that are perfect for winter in the mountains in Greece, but summer on the beach it’s all about these fresh ingredients, it’s all about the vegetables. These little vine leaves: absolutely perfect.

The Greek Salad That Isn’t a Salad, and Dakos

Tomatoes — obviously we had tomatoes in the Greek salad. The Greek salads are perhaps not what you would be used to as a Greek salad. They’re not refined, they’re hunks of vegetables. You’ve got big bits of tomatoes and cucumbers and feta cheese and onions and olive oil. No lettuce at all, no lettuce anywhere near. This is pure, unadulterated, very few ingredients. Not really on a menu as a main course, as a salad course. The Greek salad — of course it’s not called a Greek salad, it’s just a salad — and it’s a side dish, but delicious obviously.

You also got tomatoes on top of a rusk. This is called a dakos. I’ve not seen this elsewhere, I think it’s particular to Crete. You get these rusks, they’re like a round rusk, a sort of crunchy stale bread, with then a sort of crushed up tomato. It’s like their version of a tomato bread, so tomato bread that you might get in Spain, it’s like that but with a thicker layer of tomato. This is not just a little skimming of tomatoes, it’s a thicker layer of tomatoes with a bit of feta on it as well. Absolutely lovely. That again, great starter. I think by the time we got to the main courses we weren’t that interested, because the starters was just so good.

Spinach Pies and Deep Fried Aubergine

We also had some little spinach pies. So they make a type of filo and it’s not your really fine filo that you might get in a baklava, it’s a filo pastry but a little bit more rustic than that, with then a filling of spinach and feta and onions wrapped around. And we had these both baked and fried — I think the fried versions are better, but they’re a lovely little thing, quite adorable.

We also had one of my other favourites — so all my favourites honestly, Greek food is just so wonderful — deep fried aubergine slices. So very simple, just a slice of aubergine, big fat slice of aubergine, dipped in flour and then deep fried. And there’s a sweetness to it, you get the soft — the aubergine goes into that soft and creamy texture inside, but you’ve still got the crispness of the batter on the outside. Absolutely, I can taste it and I can see where we were sitting. We had a cold beer and we’ve just got this spread in front of us of all these different dishes, because we wanted to try everything.

Tzatziki: The Tip That Changed Everything

And there were little dips with whipped feta, and another dip, obviously — it’s not tzatziki so, seems to be some disagreement about tzatziki and how to make it, particularly whether or not it should have mint in it.

Now the version that we were eating in Crete, and what the best versions that we had in Crete, that we then tried to replicate at home and we’ve got it pretty much close to perfection, has mint in it, not dill. But I know a lot of people say it should have dill in it and not mint. I’m pretty sure that’s location specific, but if there’s mint around then people are going to use mint, and if mint tastes good use the mint.

So this is another dish where you have to get the water out of the vegetable. So you have to salt the cucumber and then squeeze it, and you squeeze it and squeeze it and squeeze it until there is hardly anything left of it, because so much water’s come out of it. And the tip we got from someone in Crete, which really works, is to stop it from tasting too garlicky. Because if you squeeze all that out and then add the garlic, then you can get a kind of raw garlic bitterness about it. But if you crush the garlic into this grated cucumber while it’s being salted, then you squeeze the whole mixture and get as much water out as you possibly can, then that water takes away some of the bitterness of the garlic at the same time.

So then when you add that in to the yoghurt with a bit of mint, with some pepper — if you can, white pepper. Another little tip was to use white pepper rather than black pepper to get the really authentic flavour. I think some of that might just be to stop you having black bits in it, but it does make a difference. No need to salt, because you’ve got the salt — most of the salt goes out with the water when you’re squeezing the cucumber, but there’s enough salt left in, so you don’t need to salt it again.

And this makes — you can make big batches of, I know when we make these batches of tzatziki they disappear. We make a big bowl. So if you’re still buying tzatziki in a little tub from the supermarket, then make your own, and you can make these massive big tubs for the price of a little bit of Greek yoghurt and a cucumber. It’s genuinely worth it.

So a whole big plate full of dips: you’ve got tzatziki, you’ve got the whipped feta dips, you’ve got a dip which is basically aubergine that’s been cooked to its life, we’ve got the courgette fritters, we’ve got the aubergine fritters, we’ve got a bit of Greek salad, we’ve got this dakos with all its rusk and tomato — it was absolutely wonderful, wonderful spread. And that’s the sort of what we were eating at lunchtime, so go to George at lunchtime to have this wonderful vegetable spread.

And then in the evenings we’d walk along the beach with all the little lights lit up, and we’d walk along to another restaurant called Petra Bay. And that was where we’d have more of these — we had some gyros there, we had some other kebab type things there, and they were lovely and very well cooked and the atmosphere is beautiful, but it doesn’t really say Greece to me in my memories, and what we took away from the trip, quite as much as these vegetables that we had in George’s.

Gemista: Stuffed Vegetables Done the Cretan Way

The other thing we had was a dish called gemista — I hope I’m pronouncing that right. This is stuffed vegetables, so this is stuffed tomatoes, stuffed peppers with a rice filling. And they came served on a plate with some potato slices and a kind of tomatoey sauce with it.

And again, so I looked up how to make this, and yet again the rice isn’t cooked. I thought that these were vegetables that were then stuffed with a cooked rice. They’re not. You take the vegetables, you scoop out — so you scoop out things like bits of courgette and the tomatoes, obviously the peppers you just de-seed, slice the top off, de-seed — and then you fill it with a mixture of rice and onions and a little bit of the tomato and courgette mix, and some oregano, and you can put feta in as well if you want it to be a bit richer.

And then you put the lids back on these vegetables and you cook it. But you can cook it with potatoes, so you lay the potato bits on the bottom of the dish and they help to balance the vegetables. And then you put in the rest of whatever’s left of the mixed up tomato and the courgette, and you pour that in, and then you put in some water and some white wine, and put a lid on and then cook it all together. And you get this mix, all the mixture of flavours, and all the mixture of the flavours of the vegetables, the flavours of the peppers, the flavours of the feta and the oregano, all get into the rice. And the wine gives it that little bit of an edge. And so when it’s all cooked you can serve the potatoes as well, because they’re delicious, serve it all on this big platter, and it just makes for the most delicious vegetarian platter for a summer dish.

I’m in fact talking about this — this is making me hungry. So I’m going to cook this maybe tonight.

And this is when now, when we think Greek, we no longer think about the gyros, we no longer think about the meat. This is what we think about, we think about these vegetables and things cooked up with this rice and these very clean flavours. And just wonderful. And it’s such a great example of travelling for food, that the food is different when you travel to different places, and that we’ve not had food like this elsewhere. With this, this was Cretan food. And I’ve no doubt that there are lots and lots of other Cretan recipes that deserve a mention, and I’ve no doubt we could do an entire season of podcast talking about the different recipes of Cretan food, because it’s got such wonderful ingredients.

Watermelon and Raki: The Beginning and the End

And I’m so — oh, watermelon. Haven’t mentioned the watermelon. One of the really lovely things in Greece when we were there was that you got watermelon as a starter portion — not even a starter, it’s like an amuse-bouche — slices of watermelon.

Watermelon isn’t something that we eat a lot of. We eat a lot of melon where we live, the melon is grown in the fields around, so we eat a lot of melon in the summer, but it’s a Charentais melon, it’s got an orange flesh, it’s quite firm, it’s not at all a watermelon. And so we’re eating these bits of watermelon, and we’re like, don’t really get watermelon, it’s not really as, you know, that much of a flavour, and what’s the point of it.

And then we realised, something clicked, that we should think about the watermelon not as a fruit in the same way we thought about the melon that we eat, but more like a cucumber. Now that sounds completely mad. But when you taste watermelon, if you put watermelon and eat watermelon and think melon, then somehow — at least me, I’m sure there’s people that think I’m mad here — there’s you eat watermelon and if you’re thinking melon then your taste buds are kind of disappointed, because you’re not getting the melon, you’re not getting this flavorful sugary sweet fruit. What you’re getting is crisp and refreshing. And so I thought of cucumber, and as soon as I did that and started eating the watermelon as though it were cucumber, it totally changed, totally changed my viewpoint on watermelon. And now I love watermelon, but I love watermelon as a palate cleanser. And in the same way as you might use cucumber, to the extent that I now actually put watermelon into my salads. So things like a pasta salad or any sort of salad, a summer salad benefits from some cubed up watermelon. It’s fantastic.

So the restaurants were serving us this — they were free, we weren’t charged anything for these plates of watermelon, little slices of watermelon. And we realise it’s because there’s just so many watermelons. We were seeing pickup trucks stacked up with these watermelons the size of basketballs, just full in the back of pickup trucks. And so they were cheap as chips. If we went to supermarkets they’re selling watermelon for 50 cents, it’s just madness. But it was a really nice way to start a meal and a really nice touch.

So, watermelon at the beginning and then raki at the end. So little glasses of raki, the very powerful spirit that’s used there, and again not charged. Just people come over, you can have a glass of this, I’ll have a glass of this before you finish. Absolutely wonderful. The people in the restaurants, the service we got was amazing, and no sort of impression that they were upset to see tourists, just this really happy to share and talk about their food. They’re so proud of their food and the origins of the food, so Cretan food, absolutely amazing. I would go back in a heartbeat.

Final Thoughts

And the big takeaway: courgette fritters, tzatziki, stuffed vegetables. Keep it vegetarian, keep it simple and summery.

And that’s it for today’s episode of European Compass. Make sure you add a bit of Greek into those summer dishes. Thanks for joining me. If you enjoyed today’s episode, then share it with a fellow food traveller and don’t forget to subscribe for more delicious adventures. Bon appétit and happy travels.