What are the Popular local dishes & sweets to eat in Crete?
EXPLORE THE BEST PLACES TO EAT AND DRINK IN CHANIA WITH CAFE, RESTAURANTS, BARS AND CLUBS.
Of course, you’ll find all your Greek favorites in tavernas and restaurants – pastitsio, moussaka, souvlaki, keftedes (meatballs), tzatziki, and horiatiki (Greek salad) – but once you’ve been introduced to local Cretan cuisine, you won’t be ordering anything else. Below are some of the classics found in most tavernas.
Popular local dishes & sweets
Dakos salad
Also known as koukouvagia (owl), dakos is Crete’s best-known salad. A bed of softened barley rusk (paximadi) is generously topped with chopped tomatoes and crumbled feta or mizithra cheese and flavored with oregano. Your dakos salad may or may not have olives but it will be crowned with plenty of extra-virgin olive oil.
Vegetable-based dishes
Hortopitakia are small, square pies filled with wild greens, onion, fennel, olive oil, and typically mizithra cheese (although you’ll find different versions around Crete), and kalitsounia are small cheese pies, also with myzithra. Honey can be drizzled on before serving for an extra sweet touch. Meanwhile, marathopites are thin, round pancake-like pies filled with fennel. And boureki is a specialty of Chania, consisting of layers of potatoes, courgettes (or pumpkin in winter months), myzithra, and mint.
Snails
They love snails in Crete and cook them in an incredible number of ways. A favourite dish is chochlioi boubouristi – as delicious as it is hard to pronounce. The snails are pan-fried face down (boubouristi means face-down in the local dialect) with olive oil, rosemary and vinegar. Boiled wild greens often add the finishing touch.
Pasta and wheat-based dishes
You’ll find plenty of pasta variations in Crete but if you want to try a version traditionally made by Cretan housewives, look for skioufichta makarounia. Flour and water are bound, kneaded and rolled into long, thin sausage shapes. They are then cut, rolled into thumb-sized curls and boiled in salted water, and served with nothing but staka (clarified butter) and grated kefalotyri or anthotyro cheese (or maybe some fried sausage or apaki). Simple and utterly delicious. Another classically Cretan taste is xinohondros (fermented cracked wheat with sour milk or yogurt, made into a soup). It is one of the oldest ways of preserving milk and was once a staple village meal.
Traditional handmade Cretan pasta, served with local cheese. The taste of delight in a village square in #Crete.
Gamopilafo – wedding popular local dishes
Before moving onto the meat dishes, there’s Crete’s most famous accompaniment – gamopilafo (wedding rice, as it translates). There’s nothing amazingly complicated about gamopilafo … just rice cooked in meat broth, seasoned just enough (but not too much) and finished with generous amounts of staka butter. But the taste makes you close your eyes in satisfaction. It’s served at weddings and festivities (with plenty of meat) but you’ll find it in restaurants and tavernas too.
Cretan meat dishes
Kreatotourta (meat tart, as the name translates) is a meat pie – typically goat or lamb that is boiled and taken off the bone and then layered with a combination of cheeses (eg anthotyro, xynomyzithra and graviera) on a pastry-lined dish. Mint, seasoning, staka and some of the meat stock are added before the pie is sealed with a pastry lid and baked.Tsigariasto arni or katsiki is lamb or goat gently cooked in a generous amount of oil (the name comes from the sizzling sound it makes), allowing it to become tender without losing any of its goodness. Meanwhile, arni stamnagathi is lamb cooked with one of Crete’s favourite greens (see above). One of the most famous Cretan meat dishes is antikristo, whole sides of lamb or goat speared with a wooden stick and suspended alongside (but never over) a wood fire for hours as it gently cooks. There’s no sight more worthy of a couple of glasses of raki than tiers of antikristo placed in a circle around an open-air fire at a mountain festival.
Cretan sweets
Ending your feast of Cretan dishes are the classic sweets. First in line are kalitsounia lichnarakia. You’ll remember the kalitsounia cheese pies above and, sure enough, these pieces of pastry heaven also have cheese (myzithra) but they are given a sweet twist with cinnamon-flavoured pastry and honey mixed into the cheese. They are traditionally eaten at Easter but are utterly addictive, so you’ll find them all year round. Another cheese-based pie turned into a sweet by honey (and a mint kick) are sfakianes pites, which are like little pancakes, originally from Sfakia, in southern Crete. Moving onto festival sweets, kserotigana are spirals of thin pastry, gently fried before being soaked in sugar-and-honey syrup infused with cinnamon and served with chopped walnuts. And loukoumades (though not exclusive to Crete) are somewhere between puffs and doughnuts, eaten freshly cooked with a generous covering of honey and nuts. They are the taste of childhood for many Greeks.
Ending your feast of Cretan dishes are the classic sweets. First in line are the popular local dishes kalitsounia lichnarakia. You’ll remember the kalitsounia cheese pies above and, sure enough, these pieces of pastry heaven also have cheese (myzithra) but they are given a sweet twist with cinnamon-flavoured pastry and honey mixed into the cheese. They are traditionally eaten at Easter but are utterly addictive, so you’ll find them all year round. Another cheese-based pie turned into a sweet by honey (and a mint kick) are sfakianes pites, which are like little pancakes, originally from Sfakia, in southern Crete. Moving onto festival sweets, kserotigana are spirals of thin pastry, gently fried before being soaked in sugar-and-honey syrup infused with cinnamon and served with chopped walnuts. And loukoumades (though not exclusive to Crete) are somewhere between puffs and doughnuts, eaten freshly cooked with a generous covering of honey and nuts. They are the taste of childhood for many Greeks.
Article from: Discover Greece- What to eat in Crete: Popular local dishes & sweets
