As we visit food shops with cookbook writer Diane Kochilas and Chef Steve Jilleba,
our first stop is Elixir.
Here we'll buy some special herbs for the dishes she’ll be cooking later.
The shop, which deals exclusively with hard to find Greek herbs and spices,
has been in business for more than 75 years.
Proprietor Periklis Koniaris says that his customers buy herbs for medicinal purposes, too.
[Periklis Koniaris] I have many, many herbs from medicine herbs. Not only for the kitchen.
But these medicine herbs, it's from Europe and from Asia.
[Diane Kochilas speaking] We don't only use herbs in our cooking, but we also use herbs for their therapeutic values.
So, we make infusions and tisanes with them, and we actually drink the stuff.
The herb vendors work almost like the people's pharmacies.
Until a generation ago people would come and specifically look for specific herbs for different ailments.
[Chef Steve Jilleba] And they still do it today. [Diane Kochilas speaking] And they still do it.
[Periklis Koniaris] This is the most, most famous oregano. It's from Peloponnesus Island....
From the central of the Peloponnesus in Tripoli. This is the area.
And it's from the high mountains and smells very, very nice. It's a lot of flowers here.
[Chef Steve Jilleba] Very fragrant. [Diane Kochilas] Yeah, smells great.
[Periklis Koniaris] I think the people who take oregano, take this one, you don't take the crushed one,
because the crushed one, it is not smell very nice like this one.
It's better to take and you go home, to crush it with your hands.
And you put in the jar, and you have fresh oregano for one year.
[Narrator] Herbs, both fresh and dried, are essential to Greek cooking and each has its place.
Mint pairs well with cheese pies, oregano is best with Greek salad and feta,
thyme complements lamb, rosemary enhances pork,
and sage appears primarily in herbal teas.
Next door, at Arapian, we stop to taste an unusual selection of cured meats.
Greece has a wide repertoire of charcuterie, with recipes varying from region to region.
Arapian purveyor Fanis treats us to a sampling of spicy preserved meats from Macedonia and Thrace,
including pastourmá – strip loin of beef coated with red pepper,
fenugreek, garlic, cumin, and rye flour.
In addition to salumi from two Ionian islands, and noumboulo, spice-rubbed,
smoked pork loin from Corfu, Fani offers up a sampling of ouzo.
[Fanis speaking] Just taste a little of this. With ouzo.
[Diane Kochilas] I can't believe I'm drinking ouzo at ten o'clock in the morning.
[Chef Steve Jilleba] I didn't expect any less. (laughter)
[Narrator] As Diane says, these spicy and salty cured meats are the best accompaniments to ouzo.
[Diane Kochilas] What we just tasted, these are some of the best meze for ouzo.
So, very strong, very pungent.
[Chef Steve Jilleba] Little bit of salt, spice. [Diane Kochilas] Yeah.
[Diane Kochilas] Salt, spice and paréa. You know what that is? Company!
[Narrator] The hospitality we experience at Arapian, exemplifies the most important ingredient in Greek cooking....
[Diane Kochilas] The most important element in Greek cooking is what we call "filotimo," which means "generosity."
You want to share what you have, with the people you're with.
[Narrator] We visit the Ariston Pie Shop near Syntagma Square, in business since 1910,
to examine pites or pies, a cornerstone in Greek food culture.
These pies are not the sweet pies you might imagine,
but rather flaky turnovers usually made with phyllo dough
and stuffed with a variety of greens, cheeses and meats.
Spanokopita, spinach pie, and tiropito, cheese pie, are the most common,
but virtually every region in Greece produces a multitude of variations
with different shapes, pastry dough, and fillings.
Ariston makes 70 kinds of pies six days a week.
Everything is made from scratch every day – nothing is frozen, everything is fresh.
[Woman speaking] When I asked Eleni, I told her how much work this was. She said,
"yes, it is a lot of work, but it's gratifying, because we're making something good
and we're keeping to the Greek tradition."
[Narrator] Arriving at the Athens Central Market,
Diane guides Steve through a wide selection of fish and seafood.
[Diane Kochilas] This is a very typical array of Greek fish. John Dory Fish....
And the provenance is always listed on the sign. Right.It says "Naxos" in Greek.
Um....This is Tsipoura, which is "sea bream," I think.
And there's, uh.... Fagri is definitely a kind of bream.
In the corner, the pinkish one.
Red mullets. Classic Greek fish. Mediterranean fish. Um.....
That's really what he's got here today. And these are big prawns from Platamona, which is in the north.
[Narrator] Diane offers a crash course in octopus cookery.
Octopus is almost as versatile as chicken, but it's important to handle it properly.
[Diane Kochilas] We can't come to a Greek fish market without pointing out the absolute most famous Greek seafood, right?
.....Which is octopus. And this is actually.... This guy has got great octopus today. It's really big.
And it's exactly the kind that we want. How do we know that?
It's the two rows of suckers. That's what we always look for in an octopus.
The species that has one row is not as tasty. And the meat....
[Chef Steve Jilleba] Not as tender? [Diane Kochilas] It's not as tasty.
[Diane Kochilas] The tenderizing has to do the way the octopus is actually treated after it comes out of the water.
You know, usually it's — "beat it a biblical 40 times."
Or you could throw it in a dryer — the spin can of a washing machine, dry and beat it that way.
Or you can freeze it which also breaks down the cell structure and tenderizes it.
Yeah, the other thing that's interesting about....
There are all sorts of schools of thought about how to cook an octopus.
Some people drop it into a, you know, pot of water and boil it altogether.
In restaurants — usually in Greek restaurants, anyway —
it goes into the oven with wine, and all sorts of garlic, bay leaves all sorts of herbs.
My way of doing it, and it's the way that I learned from Greek home cooks,
is to put it in a pot with absolutely no liquid.
Very, very low heat. Cover the pot. The octopus exudes its own sea water.
And what you end up with is this very intense octopus broth
that makes a great base for Skordalia — that garlic, you know, the potato, garlic dip.
I put some of that in there. It's delicious.
But if the octopus.... it retains its flavor that way.
[Diane Kochilas] I think it loses flavor when you cook it in... [Chef Steve Jilleba] Long periods of cooking time?
[Diane Kochilas] Depends on the size. I mean, this would need... I would say before it's actually ready to eat....
....about an hour and a half. You cook it.... You put it in a pot by itself on a very low flame.
This size, maybe for about 50 minutes, 55 minutes....
And then you add whatever it is you're going to add to it. Garlic, onions, olive oil, wine, tomatoes, orange, olives....
If you're grilling it, you also have to tenderize it first, yeah.
To my taste buds, a grilled octopus should be like a good steak.
I'm not a fan of filet mignon. I want the cut that you actually have to chew and work at to get the flavor out of.
And I think the same holds true for an octopus. You want it to be a little bit chewy.
It's usually it's over-boiled in Greek restaurants in the United States
and you get this flaccid, kinda soft, melts in your mouth....
[Diane Kochilas] And I think that's not.... [Chef Steve Jilleba] You want that nice char. [Diane Kochilas] Right, you want the charred chewiness.
[Diane Kochilas] And the way to do that is either to poach them a little bit, or you cook it in its own juices a little bit.
Some people actually sundry it and that toughens up the meat a little bit and then you grill it.
And you see that on Greek islands. Octopus....
Very famous pictures of octopus hanging on clothes lines to toughen up a little bit, to dry out a little bit....
The octopus is a great.... It's actually a very versatile dish.
There are so many different ways to cook it. It's not only grilled, I mean....
There are all sorts of stews made with octopus....
[Chef Steve Jilleba] And all over the world, too. [Diane Kochilas] All over the world, yeah.
[Diane Kochilas] Greeks generally don't like the small... [Chef Steve Jilleba] The baby octopus. [Diane Kochilas] Yeah, we don't like that very much.
We find that it's not the most popular seafood.
[Narrator] Arriving at a nearby cheese emporium, Diane helps us distinguish between good feta and great feta.
[Diane Kochilas] Well, we had Octopus 101. Now, we're gonna have Cheese 101.
Let me point out. This is the feta counter here.
Feta is the national cheese of Greece. Everybody's heard of it.
One major point — feta is never ever, ever made with cows milk.
It's always made with sheep's milk, or a combination of sheep and goats milk.
We have various types of fetas here.
And one cheese which is very similar to feta, but cannot actually legally be called feta,
which is made with 100% goat's milk and it's simply a goat's milk brine cheese.
Now, the thing that I want to point out.... One of the things I want to point out — you see the difference in shape....
This is made in blocks and it's aged in tins.
And this is aged in barrels and you can see the barrels right down here.
The barrel aged feta, in my opinion, tends to be higher quality,
because the barrel breathes, and the cheese ages in a more natural, you know....
[Chef Steve Jilleba] You get some amazing flavors. [Diane Kochilas] Yeah. Yeah.
[Diane Kochilas] Tin-aged feta and tin-aged brined cheeses were kind of an invention of feta producers in the early 60s,
because the you can fit a lot more into a container, when you're shipping it overseas. (laughs)
So, I mean it's practical. And there's nothing wrong with it. It's just I think barrel-aged Feta tends to be a little bit better.
And we'll probably taste.... I wanted to show you some of the differences in flavor.
You know, there's a whole range of textures and sharpness in feta cheese.
And some of it has to do with where it's made, where it's from, some of it has to do with the season....
Some of it has to do with the skill of the cheese maker and....
[Chef Steve Jilleba] Procedures and.... [Diane Kochilas] Often. And I think as we'll see here....
Because it is all made by the same producer.
One producer might make a range of textures, or a range of sharpness or mildness.
Just to appeal to a wider range of customers.
One of the tell-tale signs of the quality of the feta
is the way it finishes on your tongue, on your palate.
What you want to look for is feta that finishes — is a creamy finish.
If you're getting a grainy finish on the roof of your mouth, you've got feta that's been made with powdered milk.
Let's see. What else do you want to know about feta? This is the quintessential versatile cheese.
We eat it for every occasion, in every meal. Breakfast, lunch and dinner. All different applications.
It's a very good table cheese. It's the classic cheese in a Greek salad, of course.
Goes great with extra-virgin olive oil. Goes great even with honey.
Maybe we'll try to taste some of that later.
It's a very good cheese to cook with. It's very popular in fillings for savory pies,
Peppers stuffed with feta cheese, that makes a great meze.
Um....you know, you can do just about anything with it.
[Narrator] The shop carries other popular Greek cheeses, too.
These cheeses include dried myzithra for grating, smoked Metsovone, ladotyri, and manouri.
[Diane Kochilas] This is probably one of the most interesting yellow cheeses in Greece. it's called ladotyri.
That means "oil cheese." And it's actually....
It's in the family of the Kefalogravieras, the Kefalotyri, actually.
Which is a hard yellow cheese. But this is a sheep's milk cheese.
And it's after the cheese is formed and and ripened to a certain hardness,
it's dipped in olive oil and preserved in olive oil. That was the whole point.
[Chef Steve Jilleba] But that's an aged cheese. [Diane Kochilas] Yeah this is an aged cheese.
And it it's got a very unusual sharp flavor and almost a squeaky texture.
[Chef Steve Jilleba] And what do you use it for....? [Diane Kochilas] It's a table cheese. Yeah. It's just a table cheese.
Greeks, we eat a lot of cheese here. We're big cheese eaters.
Then here we have my absolute favorite Greek cheese.
This is called manouri. This is another sheep's milk cheese. This is like ricotta salata in the states.
it's a very creamy, generally made in the northern part of a country.
It's a very creamy, very mild, very buttery table cheese
that's actually very good dessert cheese. It's wonderful with fruit,
it's wonderful with honey, with all sorts of, you know, fruit preserves. It's a really nice....
With poached fruit. It's very amenable to that kind of serving.
[Narrator] Three hard yellow cheeses are also Greek favorites: graviera, kasseri, and kefalotyri.
Here, too, is sheep and goats’ milk butter.
Greeks use this fermented butter to brush phyllo leaves for crisp baklava.
[Diane Kochilas] This works really well with phyllo. If you have baklava, you're making baklava, and you use this to brush your phyllo with....
It just adds this element, this flavor dimension.
[Chef Steve Jilleba] Is it a sourness that it's bringing a little tiny bit?
[Diane Kochilas] This is a fermented butters, so it is a little bit more.... It's sour, a more sour butter, yeah.
This is not anywhere near the full range of Greek cheese.
There's the last time I counted there was something like 65 unique regional Greek cheeses.
Many of them, you know, produced in very small quantities, very regionally, hard to find outside of the country.
But I think more and more of them are are being exported, yeah.
[Narrator] Next stop: the Mastiha shop. Here we find all manner of foods, liqueurs, and sweets
made from the crystallized resin of a tree related to the pistachio.
A tree that only grows on the island of Chios.
Mastiha, or Mastic, was prized in ancient times as a breath sweetener and chewing gum.
Mastiha has a chewy texture and imparts a woodsy flavor
to breads, puddings, and even savory dishes.
Now sold in specialty food stores in the United States and elsewhere,
Mastiha is finding fans well beyond Greece.