Recent Episodes

 

Dwight Furrow, the author of American Foodie: Taste, Art, and the Cultural Revolution, talks about the philosophy of food. We discuss everything the impact of everything from automobile to Alice Waters to the Slow Food movement have shaped the way Americans think about food.
 
 
 
 

 

Inbal Baum, the Founder of Delicious Israel, joins us to talk about where foodies should eat when they travel to her country.

• Shakshouka is a popular dish in Israel
• Israeli Breakfast is a distinct and important meal
• The modern cherry tomato has roots in Israel
• Tel Aviv and Jerusalem top the list of cities you should visit
• Beach season runs from April to October
• Rosh Hashana is a great time to visit Israel
• When you visit Tel Aviv, go to the Carmel Market, the Levinsky Market
• Try the date syrup, Silan

 

 

Food for Thought

• Q: After pita bread, what is the most common food used to “wipe” humus?
• A: Raw onion.

 
 

Out of the Frying Pan

• Favorite Spot for Outdoor Dining: Milgo & Milbar
• Favorite Place to Buy Spices: Cafe Arma in Levinsky Market
• Herbs to Try: Za’atar and Hawaij (in Yemenite Coffee)
• Favorite Winery: Sphera
• Favorite Place for Dessert: The Malabia
• Favorite Food Experience for Kids: Max Brenner
• Chef to Watch: Eyal Shani
• Dish to Try at Different Places: Shakshouka and sabich

Bennet Jacobstein, author of The Joy of Ballpark Food: From Hot Dogs to Haute Cuisine, talks to us about what foodies can find at different baseball stadiums around the country.

• Hot dogs and sausages are not the same thing.
• The quality of ballpark food was elevated in the 90s as new stadiums were built and food television shows took off.
• Stadiums have highlighted regional foods.
• Gordon Biersch‘s founder Dan Gordon introduced garlic fries at Candlestick Park in 1994.
• The song “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” was written in 1908.
• The Yankees replaced Cracker Jacks at one point, but brought it back after a public outcry.
• 

  San Francisco Giant Gordon Biersch Garlic Fries

  Veggie Happy spearheaded the movement to get veggie dogs sold at ballpark stadiums.

• Andrew Zimmern has a stand in the Minnesota ballpark.
• Rocky Mountain Oysters are bull testicles.
• “The Big Six” are the food companies that service the major ballparks.
• As you go from ballpark to ballpark, try the hot dogs at each to see how they’re done differently.
• Proceeds from Bennett’s book go to Second Harvest Food Bank.

 

Food for Thought

• Q: In what year were Cracker Jacks first served at a baseball game?
• A: 1896 in Atlantic City.

 

Out of the Frying Pan

Here’s what Bennet recommends you try at each ballpark:

• Yankees Stadium in New York City: Chicken and Waffles.
• Fenway Park in Boston: Lobster Roll and a cuban sandwich.
• Wrigley Field in Chicago: Chicago-style hot dog with Vienna beef.
• Turner Field in Atlanta: Boiled peanuts.
• Marlins Park in Miami: Cuban dishes.
• Safeco Field in Seattle: The Ivar’s hot dog (with fish) and cream cheese hot dog.
• Nationals Park in Washington D.C.: A cauliflower hot dog and presidential cupcakes.
• 

  Chicago White Sox Chicago-Style Hot Dog

  Busch Stadium in St. Louis: The BBQ.

• Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles: Tommy Lasorda Spumoni ice cream.
• AT&T Park in San Francisco: Crab salad, lamb sausages, and Gordon Biersch garlic fries.

Try a Food Tour

Our walking food tour combines tasty food tasting, food history, politics, and culture.
It begins with a light breakfast and unforgettable Cretan beverage. Since Arabs, Jews, Venetians, Ottomans, Greeks from Asia Minor, and immigrants have passed through Chania, adding their flavors to the local cuisine, we will follow their trail. We will experience a multi-sensory food event and delectable delicacies from one-of-a-kind specialty food shops while enjoying the opportunity to better understand the culinary history of the city and how the locals eat.

Our walk ends with a dive into the distant past. We will visit the archaeological museum of Chania to view selected cooking vessels and to experience them more in depth as one would taste exquisite old wine. We will then visit either a ceramic workshop, where we will have a chance to enjoy a short lesson in ancient cooking or a local taverna and we will be treated to home-baked bread, made according to ancient baking method- and other fine delicacies of historic Cretan gastronomy.

More in this Country

Mariana Kavroulaki is experimental archaeologist- food historian & founder of Greek Culinary History and Cooking Adventures. GCH&CA explores the evolution of Greek cuisine throughout the centuries and the relationship between food and art as participatory performance with socio-historical focus. Her work takes many forms, including pop-up dinners, experiments, lectures, historic cooking courses, edible installations, and food walking tours. On the walking tours, the participants do not only eat but also explore the tales behind the foods and the preparation of each food item. She is the author of a Gourmand award-winning cookbook (The Language of Taste) and the founder and organizer of the biennial Symposia of Greek Gastronomy (conference).
 
 

1. What foods is your region known for?

The edible wild greens (horta) and the edilbe weeds play a vital role in the Cretan diet. Chania boast many varieties of them.  According to the season, they are eaten raw or boiled, put in pies or stewed with meat or fish. Don’t miss askolimbrous (Scolymus Hispanicus) and stamnagathi (Chicorium Spinosum). Blanched or raw, with extra virgin olive oil and a few drops of lemon juice, they can make your salad a luxury item. Cooked with lamb or octopus and egg-lemon sauce, they make delicious dishes. With a bitter flavor, the young shoots of avronies (black byrony) pairs very well with octopus or eggs. Horta Yahni, a stew of wild greens with chopped onions, wild fennel and lemon juice is another tasty dish based on greens. Octopus and cuttlefish fresh from the Cretan sea are incredibly tasty, boiled or grilled and drizzled with olive oil and lemon juice or cooked with wild fennel and green olives.
 
Askordoulakoi or vrovioi are actually the bulb of a tassel hyacinth, the muscari comosum. They are boiled and then pickled or preserved in olive oil. They are thought to stimulate the appetite.
 
The ever-popular dakos is known by regional names throughout Crete. What is it? Barley rusks lightly soaked in water to soften them and topped with grated fresh tomato, black olives and mizithra, the local creamy sheep or/and goat’s milk cheese. They are drizzled with virgin olive oil and dusted with salt and oregano. The highly aromatic bitter orange is a favorite of Chania’s cuisine. Its peel can be candied, is used in sweets, pies and salads and is turned into a typical spoon sweet (neratzaki glyko). Its juice is used as preservation for olives and gives a unique flavor to one of most popular legume dishes: chickpeas cooked with onion, olive oil and bitter orange juice.
 
Snails have been eaten since ancient times. In Chania they are cooked in many different ways but you definitely have to try the hohlioi boubouristoi which means snails with their heads looking down. They are sauteed in olive oil with sea salt, rosemary, garlic and are simmered down with wine vinegar.
 
Apaki is an excellent salt, vinegar, and smoke –cured pork meat. The final product tastes of the fresh herbs which were used to smoke it. As the name ‘gamopilafo’ hints (gamos means ‘wedding’ in Greek) this rice dish is traditionally offered in many regions of Chania as the main dish of the wedding feast. Nowadays you will find it also in many tavernas of Chania. It is a pilaf prepared in a rich broth that you make from simmering goat and hen or rooster. Lemon juice and local butter are added before the pilafi is completely done.  Its taste relies especially on the high quality of the local meat and on the aroma of the local butter used (stakovoutyro).
 
Staka comes from the separation of butter (stakovoutyro) from the milk solids by adding a little flour during heating the creamy skin that forms on the top of the fresh goat’s or/and sheep’s milk. It is eaten still warm, sprinkled with lemon juice.
 
Chania is well known for its pies. Tourta is a very rich pie used to be eaten only at Easter although now you can find it all year round. Tourta has pieces of lamb – or a whole lamb- between layers of local cheeses and phyllo.
 
Boureki is also a pie. The word derives from Turkish but the Chaniotiko Boureki is a speciality of Chania. There are many variations of it so it can consist of layers of zuchini or pumpkin, mizithra (local fresh cheese) and mint. It can be made with or without tomatoes, with or without a layer of phyllo dough.
 
Kalitsounia are small pies. They can be round, semicircular, rectangular or triangular; they are made up of phyllo and are filled with local soft cheese or greens or a mixture of them. They can be sweet or savory and are fried, oven baked or baked on “satsi” which is a domed metal piece that sits over the fire.
 
One type of pie, the Sfakiani pita, isn’t found only around Sfakia but even in the city of Chania. It looks like a pancake with soft cheese kneaded into the dough and is served with thyme honey.
 
Wild fennel pie, Marathopita, also looks like a pancake filled with chopped fennel and onions. Bougatsa is the iconic food symbol of Chania. It is made with crusty phyllo pastry and filled with fresh soft cheese. It is served cut up into small pieces, sprinkled with sugar and optionally, cinnamon.
 
Chania is famous for its cheeses. Graviera is made with sheep’s milk and resembles Swiss gruyere; its best quality is aged in caves in the White Mountains for at least six months. You can have it as a snack with a piece of bread or paximadi (rusk), in salads, fried, with fruits (especially with fresh figs and grapes) or sprinkled with good quality honey. Mizithra is a soft, creamy, white cheese. It is made with sheep’s and/or goat’s milk. It is consumed on the table, as a spread on bread and rusk, in salads, over pasta, in sweet and savory pie fillings, as a filling in rabbit and chicken dishes.
 
One very unusual cheese is malaka (=soft). It is white, very milky and elastic – sort of like mozzarella. It is mainly eaten in Easter pies. The mixture of mizithra and malaka is used in tourta and Easter kalitsouni. Apart from sfakiani pita and bougatsa, another dessert to snap up is xerotigana, etherial pastry ribbons that are coiled around a fork as they are deep fried. They come dipped in honey syrup and sprinkled with sesame seeds.
 
 

2. What is the best time of year to visit your city?

T he best time to visit Chania is in late spring – early summer, because it’s the very beginning of the touring season and nothing is crowded. Also, it’s just after the rainy season, and the gardens are bursting with flowers!
 
 

3. Are there any events foodies should plan their trip to your city around?

Agricultural August is an annual event taking place for the last 13 years in Chania. It is organised to promote the agricultural food- products of the region. Visitors can taste and buy a lot of local products.
Crete has a long sardine fishing tradition so sardine festival is as popular with Chania visitors as it is with locals. It is celebrated each year in early September on Nea Chora beach, just a short walk from the Venetian harbour of Chania.
Chania has 4 weekly farmer markets (Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday) at different locations. They are great places to buy fresh locally grown fruit and vegetables, cheeses and herbs from small producers at low prices but even if you don’t buy it will give you a glimpse of local life. The markets run from early morning until around 14.30.
 
 

4. Who are some of the chefs in your city that we should keep an eye on?

Yannis Tsivourakis, the executive chef at the five-star Minoa Hotel, modernises traditional Cretan cuisine. He is one of the few chefs who uses olive oil almost exclusively as the main ingredient for his dishes. Also, he is very fond of humble and underestimated ingredients. Iosif Petrov, executive chef at the restaurant of Serenissima hotel, creates avant garde dishes combining local ingredients and recipes with french techniques. South of Chania, in the small traditional village of Drakona, Stelios Trilirakis, chef-patron at Ntounias, honours traditional Cretan cuisine and the methods of Slow Food.
 
 

5. What can people expect on your food tours?

They can expect tasty food tastings, food history, politics and culture. Since Arabs, Jews, Venetians, Ottomans, Greeks from Asia Minor and immigrants have passed through Chania, adding their flavors to the local cuisine, they will follow their trail. Therefore, they will experience a multisensory food event and a short lesson in ancient cooking, they will be treated to historic foods made according to ancient and medieval recipes and will taste delectable delicacies from one-of-a-kind specialty food shops while enjoying the opportunity to understand better the culinary history of the city.

This is the second of a three-part series on Greek cuisine by Christopher Bakken, author of Honey, Olives, Octopus: Adventures at the Greek Table. View part 1 here.
 

Volos, Greece: Tsipouradiko Dionysis

Argonoton 3, Volos, Greece.  Tel: (011 30) 24210 22205
 
The drive from Athens to Thessaloniki takes one through the heart of Thessaly—the bread-basket of Greece, with its wide and fertile plains.  Thanks to the superhighway now connecting Greece’s two largest cities, you can complete the whole journey in around six hours, though I heartily recommend breaking the trip in half with a stop in Volos, a lovely port city with an underappreciated culinary reputation.  Very appealing, busy restaurants line the harbor front.
 
My favorite of these is the always impeccable Tsipouradiko Dionysis, where you can dine just feet away from the water and watch the sailboats and fishing caiques bob up and down in their narrow slips.  Poetically, the restaurant is located on “Argonoton,” or Argounat Street.  Indeed, once upon a time, Jason and his men, the Argonauts, sailed from ancient Volos in search of the Golden Fleece.
 
Since 1956, Tsipouradiko Dionysis has specialized in the ritual of the “tsipouro meze” as it is practiced in Volos.  Tsipouro is the home-made ouzo of Thessaly and northern Greece.  It is somewhat higher in alcohol than Cretan raki and is usually made with anise and other botanicals.  In Volos, your tsipouro arrives in tiny bottles (each holds a single shot) and your mesimeriano is not over until your table is littered with them.  The tradition in Volos is to order nothing but tsipouro.  A meze (singular) automatically arrives to accompany each miniature bottle you order and the mezedes (plural) become more complicated, satisfying and delicious the more bottles you order.
 

RELATED: Top Five Dishes Travelers Should Eat in Crete

 

It was a pity that I arrived at Dionysis alone when I ate there in June, because I would have liked to try everything on their menu.  I was fed beautifully nevertheless.  Alongside my first tiny bottle of tsipouro came a plate of pickled vegetables (peppers, carrots, and cauliflower) and a smear of their patatasalata (potato salad): bright yellow potatoes mashed with carrot, lemon, and parsley.  With the second bottle arrived a plate of lightly grilled pleurotus (oyster) mushrooms, drizzled with good oil.  Then, a salad of boiled beets and their greens tossed with garlic and oil.
 
I should have stopped there, since it’s easy to make a completely satisfying vegetarian meal out of mezes.  But when a plate of grilled octopus passed by en route to another table I decided to order a third little tsipouro. The octopus leg that came with it had been boiled until very, very tender and then kissed with some fire and sliced on the bias before it received a splash of simple red vinegar and parsley.  Octopus and tsipouro are made for one another: the anise in the spirit is a perfect foil for the wisps of smoke and char and the rich marine flesh.
 
By that point, my culinary enthusiasm was obvious and I struck up a conversation with the waiter about the kinds of fish being pulled into the Volos harbor that week.  When he mentioned that they’d just received a lovely bunch of koutsoumoura from off the Pelion Peninsula, I swooned.  Koutsoumoura are the smaller cousins of barbounia, or red mullet, and I am obsessed with both fish in the summertime.  Both fish turn bright red when they are fried and their flesh is as sweet as lobster.
 

RELATED: Sample Christopher Bakken’s Book on Greek Cuisine

 
By that point I had asked for the bill, expecting the restaurant would offer me a parting gift of fresh fruit or a little something sweet.  Instead, the waiter returned with one more little bottle of tsipouro (“our gift,” he said with a wink) and a few perfectly crisp koutsoumoura on a plate.  I doused them with lemon and ate every bite of that dessert, from head to tail.
 

 
This is part two of three. View part 1 here.

This is the first of a three-part series on Greek cuisine by Christopher Bakken, author of Honey, Olives, Octopus: Adventures at the Greek Table.
 

Mesimeriano

In Greece, the most important meal of the day—and usually the most exciting—is the mid-day meal, the mesimeriano.   While it’s possible to translate mesimeriano as “lunch,” that doesn’t begin to get at the concept.  Americans usually treat “lunch” as the sober and utilitarian half hour with which they break up their work-day.  The Greek mesimeriano, on the other hand, rarely begins before two in the afternoon and often lasts for many, many hours. Mezedes, the appetizer-sized plates of Greece, are ordered in abundance and shared around the table.  This occasion for drinking and dining is treated as a ritualized occasion for pleasure, sustained conversation, relaxation and, if the mood strikes, singing.  What follows the mesimeriano is usually not a return to work, but a long, satisfying snooze somewhere in the shade or by the sea.  Most Greek businesses re-open from six to nine at night, once everyone re-emerges from the siesta and returns to waking life.
 
The menu of the mesimeriano depends, in part, on the beverage of choice.  Beer and wine are fine choices (though wine-drinking always feels like a nighttime sport to me), but afternoons in Greece are more typically lit with the brightness of spirits distilled from the grape—ouzo, tsipouro, and raki–as well as the salty, spicy, and fortifying dishes specifically designed to be consumed along with them.
 
I just returned from seven weeks of travel in Greece and I enjoyed the mesimeriano almost every day.  Some were easier to recover from than others: a few mesimeriana didn’t end until it was time to begin thinking about dinner.  Although every mesimeriano felt like an event to be remembered, I’ve limited myself to describing just three of these meals, as an excuse to recommend the restaurants where they happened.
 

RELATED: Sample Christopher Bakken’s Book on Greek Cuisine

 
 

My first Mesimeriano, Heraklion, Crete:  Mezedadiko Peninta/Peninta

Odos 1866, ap. 20.  Heraklion.  Tel: (011 30) 2810 286220
 
Greece’s national drink, ouzo (and also tsipouro—see below), is spiked with anise, is typically diluted with water and ice, and is meant to be sipped.  Ouzo is sweet and fiery and one goes to a place called an ouzeri to sip ouzo and share mezedes.On Crete, however, you drink raki.  Like ouzo, raki is distilled from the by-products of wine making, but this grappa-like rocket-fuel has no anise (confusingly, if you order raki in Turkey, you get something much closer to ouzo).  On Crete, it is poured from chilled carafes into tiny shot glasses and is meant to be downed in one gulp.  The best raki is smooth and clean as glass: the quintessence of the grape.  Since it is lower in alcohol than ouzo, it’s not unreasonable to throw back a dozen or more shots over the course of a meal.
 
The day I wandered into Peninta/Peninta (i.e. “50/50”), I had no intentions of touching the stuff. I’d just arrived on the island that morning, having taken the overnight ship from Piraeus to Crete. My legs were still rubbery from the crossing and my head swam a little, so drinking didn’t seem like a great idea. But I was hungry, which is how I wound up in Heraklion’s central market.
 
As with most Greek cities, some of the best meals are found right in the marketplace, where vegetables, fish, and meat are being peddled just steps from your table. While I was disappointed to see that the Heraklion market had been invaded by tourist shops (all of them selling the same, mass-produced Chinese garbage), I was stunned by the quality of my lunch at Peninta/Peninta.
 
I sat against the restaurant’s back wall, where I found a table bathed in sunshine.   Within moments—before I’d had a chance to order a more sensible beverage—one of the waiters arrived at my table with a “tablecloth” square of butcher paper, a frozen carafe of raki, a thimble-sized glass, and a bowl of tiny Cretan olives.  Seconds later he returned with a small bag of bread.  No, he brought me a small bag of perfect bread—some pieces brown, some white, and some flecked with barley.  All had been made with a wild yeast starter and hailed from the nearby “Touli” bakery, which has kept Heraklion in excellent bread since 1865.  Helpless before these opening salvos of hospitality, I filled my glass with raki and tilted it back, my face to the sun.
 
I don’t really remember ordering about a half hour later, but I ordered perfectly, assembling the essential elements of the Cretan diet before me: grain, greens, fish, and olive oil.  The best organic olive oil in Greece comes from Crete and a bottle of it was there on the table.  It was golden and scratchy and had been pressed from green fruit: perfect with the bread.
 

RELATED: The Top 5 Dishes Travelers Should Eat in Crete

 

To accompany raki, you want something salty, so I ordered a plate of gavros marinatos, fresh anchovy filets lightly salted and marinated in vinegar, sweet onions, tomatoes, and parsley.  For my salad, I got lucky.  Cretans are excellent foragers and they eat a hundred kinds of horta, or wild greens.  But the season for each green is short, since the summer heat demolishes most of the delicate mountain greens.  But they still had stamnagathi on the menu and I was quick to order a plate.  Stamnagathi is a kind of spiny chickory with dark green, crunchy, serrated leaves.  The greens had been trimmed of their root ends and were tossed in lots of that scratchy oil and some coarse sea salt.  A lemon wedge woke them up and I inhaled the whole plate before the sun could wilt even one leaf.
 
When I finished my first carafe of raki and the waiter replaced it, I considered ordering more food.  The menu at Peninta/Peninta offered many other temptations: snails sautéed with rosemary and vinegar; apaki–a smoked pork loin famous in Crete; local sausages lit with garlic; and a nice selection of cheeses.  But I’d eaten right and there was always the possibility of dinner.  When I left the restaurant an hour later my lips were glistening with oil, my land-legs had returned, and my brains were effervescent.

 

This is the first of a three-part series.