Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from the Heart of Manhattan Rockefeller Center, New York City News Stance Studios. Joined with John, how are you doing, John? Doing great, thanks. Great.
I also got uh Joe Hazen rocking the panels behind me. Hey, hey, hi. Welcome. Yeah, and due uh to the fact that for once uh Amazon is the one that's uh taking it. Uh we uh we aren't uh able to have any of our West Coast uh or upper left corner folks, so it'll just be you know, for our normal crew, the three of us here, we won't be able to take your live calls.
Sorry, Patreon folks. But we do have uh special guest in the show today, uh Diane uh uh Cochillis. Am I pronouncing it correctly, Cochilles? Perfectly. All right.
Uh she is uh you know, how many cookbooks do you have? Uh and if you count the American the English ones, eleven. If you count the ones that I've done in Greek, uh probably about 20 in total. So like one one or two. Like one.
And uh you can, I mean, hopefully we'll talk about it. Uh PBS show, uh My Greek Table, uh with uh Diane Klchillis. Uh it's done four seasons, but is it in trouble now with the whole No, we're just about to air season five on October 24th. I mean, like what's going on with PBS world? Well, it's the smaller stations that are gonna hurt more than the bigger ones.
So uh we're gonna we're we're out there. Uh we'll be we'll be streaming, we'll be going live on the 24th, starting to roll out. All right, nice. It's a great season. Yeah, cool.
Uh so anyway, so uh you're here though because uh you just came out with a new book, uh Food Stories, Love, Athens, a cookbook. And uh, do we I don't I don't have Quinn, so I can't tell whether we have it, but normally for our kitchen for our Patreon members, they get a discount of Kitchen Arts and Letters. I'm sure we set that up. I'm sure we do, yeah. So, you know, for those of you who are members of Patreon, pick it up, please at Kitchen Arts and Letters uh if you can, as opposed to Don't say it.
Uh yeah. I mean, listen, it really is important uh to support your local uh well they're not local if you if you have to order from online, but they're they're real actual human beings that care about their customers, so support them if you can. Uh well you're ex-New Yorker, so did you used to go there when you lived here? Kitchen Arts and Letters, oh yeah. Yeah.
Great folks. I mean, I remember Knock, you know, very well. Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, obviously he's you know passed away, but you know, Matt is uh still uh going great guns over there, and he comes on the show every uh every once in a while to talk about whatever's new and new and cool or old and cool in uh cookbooks. So anyway, so this is normally the portion of the show uh where we uh just talk about any kind of food stuff that's happened in the in the last week or so or anything that you know is new coming up in food that uh you've enjoyed. So you have anything interesting over the past week then?
In Athens or in New York? Wherever. It's up to you. Uh in Athens there's a lot going on. Uh the city is constantly reinventing itself.
Now it's it's sort of on an upswing. Uh lots of young chefs, uh kind of the internet generation. I mean, you know, uh I'm uh probably twice the age of ha most of these people nowadays, but uh lots of interesting food, a lot of reinventing Greek classics. Uh here in New York, uh there's a lot of new stuff that's opened in the Greek sort of realm, but I haven't been yet. I just got here a couple of days ago.
Oh, yeah, yeah. How long are you staying? I'm staying in the States uh this time around for a month. Yeah. Where where do you used to live in New York?
What neighborhood? I grew up in Jackson Heights. Okay, cool. Yeah. Like, well, talk about good food, huh?
Great food, yeah. Uh all right. Send uh John, what do you got for me this week? I've got two things. One, I did some Baltimore pit beef for family meal.
So what's Baltimore pit beef? Bottom round beef. Okay. Yeah. Um salt, pepper, and done on the charcoal grill.
Uh-huh. And just so it gets that like light charcoal smoke, served medium rare on a sandwich with what they call tiger sauce, which is just worth radish and mayo and sliced raw in, but yeah. Why tiger sauce? Horseradish and mayo. I don't know.
The white tigers. What does tiger have to do with horseradish? Couldn't tell you. I don't know. What does the carnivore have to do with horseradish?
Listen. Horseradish on beef. Can't go wrong. Yeah, yeah. Can't go wrong.
Except for you know what my son, Dax. Booker obviously doesn't eat it, but Dax for some reason hates horseradish. Isn't that the dumbest thing? I grew up weird. Grew up on the lower east side of New York City and hates horseradish.
Yeah. No sense. You know what that means? Means I'm a bad parent. You know what the thing is is like for those of you that are like just raising your kids now, you can't force your kids to like things.
It's weird. Like you could have you could be the pickiest person in the world. Your kid could eat everything, or vice versa. You know, you just can't control it. I don't know.
Uh so how was your uh Baltimore pit beef? It was delicious. Yeah. Yeah, really good. What kind of bread did you eat the sandwich on?
Uh Martin's potato rolls. Ah, okay. Sure. All right, so soft. Yeah.
And that is the standard. Um I think it's more like Kaiser Roll rubber. But uh can't get a good Kaiser roll in New York, strangely. Even though in the 70s and 80s, like we were the Kaiser roll like epicenters at Universe. Exactly.
Yeah. Can't can't get a good Kaiser Old Connecticut, you can. Yes, very true. Very true. Yeah.
And the other fun thing I did with the charcoal on, this is my first time doing this, but I've seen it done on the internets. Um, was dropping coals right into heavy cream, throwing a lid on the pot and just kind of letting it burn and smoke itself. I like that it yielded a really interesting flavor. Good. Okay, hold up.
Yeah. First of all, where is where is this what culture does this come from? I have no idea. I just saw it on the Instagram. Okay.
And what kind of co what kind of coals? Like real coal or like briquettes? Real coal. Okay. Yeah, yeah.
On the Instagram? Are they doing it with like freaking Kingston like compressed charcoal briquettes that are half petroleum by product? No, no. Like they're doing it with the fancy Japanese one. Like binsha tan.
Yeah, exactly. Okay. And it doesn't break the cream, the high heat doesn't break the cream. No. Okay.
And it does something uh pleasurable to the cream. Yeah. Okay. What? How hot are the coal?
Ashed? Like red hot. So just flame just died down, hasn't gone white. It's glowing. Yes.
Exactly. Alright. So it's starting to go white, but it's still glowing. Yes. Okay.
So you pull it out of the center of the fire. Yes. Okay. And you toss it in. Yep.
Into a pot with a heavy cream in it, and then throw the lid on it as soon as the coal's in there because otherwise it starts sputtering everywhere. Yeah, so I'm trying to picture this pot. How much cream, how big a pot? Two quarts of cream. Jesus.
All right. Two quarts of cream. All right. Not that much. And like in so it's one of these saucepans.
Um, and probably like a four-quart pot. Okay, so the pot's half full. Yeah. All right. How much how much of this uh fancy bing chaton you throwing in?
I didn't use fancy binge chaton, I just used some Canadian hardwood coal. Canadians, yeah. All right. Um probably like six or seven pieces. Cool.
Okay. Yeah. So not like a little like so. Can you do that for olive oil? Is that how you smoke olive oil?
I mean, I don't know. I would I would not want to put that kind of heat on to olive. That's what I was thinking of. If you were going to use it for I mean, obviously we do when we cook, but not for finishing. Right.
Yeah. So now I'm trying to picture it in my head. You throw this thing in. I'm sure there's a moment of where it goes, pshew. Yeah.
And then like a couple of minutes, a couple seconds later, right? Is that what happens? All right. So uh yeah. And so had did it boil over?
No. Okay. No, yeah. So didn't even didn't blow the lid off or anything like that. Did it scorch?
No, nothing visible yet. I didn't have to clean the pan. No, yeah. Well, no, no. Like it didn't, it didn't burn anything in that sense.
Like it just splattered everywhere in the pan. The coals kind of like floated and just strain it for any case of any ash or something. Well, you know, for those of you guys keep keeping track of uh the universe, right? So uh as soon as uh the outside of the coal is gonna be greater than you know, greater than four hundred and something degrees Fahrenheit, at those temperatures, the cream won't actually touch the coal because of the leidenfrost effect. You'll have a vapor layer around it.
The fat can touch it, right? But the water can't. And so that's probably buffering it a little bit until it mellows out, and then at that point, it's probably not gonna burn it. So I don't see why theoretically why it wouldn't work as opposed to like throwing it into a uh onto a flat top and just you know causing a nightmare. But you think it was you felt you got some cream that you couldn't achieve in any other way?
In other words, you're like, yay. Yes, like I'm making it again today or tomorrow for service this week, yeah. Really? Yeah. And what do you do with said cream?
Sorry to spend so much time with this, but this is bizarre to make it. No, it's all smoked pasticious. That sounds great. Yeah. Sounds really good.
It would make we thought it would make for really good like creme brulee base, but um, I take like so I'm doing it with the mushrooms pasta dish. So all the mushroom trimmings and cleanings steep in there, blitz it up, strain it out, and that's like the base of it, then parm lemon juice. I mean mushrooms. Man, think things have changed a lot since the day when we just like threw Lop Sang Suchang into cream to get it to be smoky and tea like old and old. It's a different kind of smoky.
I don't know. It's so hard to articulate. And I had it a lot that flavor profile a lot on my last trip to Belgium, and I couldn't. So this is a billionaire. I've seen it just on like I guess European chefs doing this.
Uh-huh. Um, so I don't know if it's specifically Belgian, but I guess they're doing it a lot because it was a flavor profile I re recognized a lot from my last trip there, but just couldn't put my finger on. And now you can put your not only your finger, you can put your coal in it. Yes, exactly. All right, cool.
All right, interesting. Yeah. All right. So uh my only real food story of the well, a couple. I'm working on I'm almost done with the book, by the way.
Hey. With the redo of my already 10-year-old book. So, like, Diane, we are exact opposites. Like, you've written like 8,000 cookbooks. I've written one book on cocktails, and then it's taken me the last two years to do my tenure revision of it.
So it's anyway. Um, so uh I have this recipe that we have at the bar called uh Sagittarius B2, which is this raspberry orjat, acid ingested raspberry, and um rum. So it's it's a you know mixture of rums because rum drinks do. Anyway, so uh this orjat is such a pain to make. It's so hard to make because unlike it, you have you mix, so it's raspberry juice is the is in the recipe, but also the orjah itself is raspberry, and so we make it with raspberry jam so that it's this can so part of the raspberry is uncooked and part of the raspberry is cooked down into a jam.
So we take this jam and we mix it with the hot water and the almonds to make the this or jot, and then we strain it, but it's impossible to strain. Impossible. It takes forever. And uh I've been wanting to take this drink off the menu because it it is is killing us, killing us at the at the bar. It's obliterating us.
You know what I mean? Like uh just a real takedown. And we we don't charge more for it, you know what I mean? And because here's the weird thing about restaurants for those of you that you know do this for a living, is that for some reason you don't factor into the food cost, the particular labor cost in a dish, right? Or in our drink.
So we're like, oh, what's the pour cost? And you look at the cost of almonds, not that bad. You look at the cost of the uh the jam, not that bad. You know what I mean? And then, oh, wait, it to make a quart takes an hour?
Oh my goodness. Now all of a sudden the cost of this thing has gone through the roof. Anyway, so I've been looking around. Turns out there's a product, this new product changed my life. Joy strange.
J-O-I, Joy. Joy brand, and I don't I've never talked to this company before. They make a nut milk base that looks like almond butter, but when you scoop it and add hot water to it, it dissolves into almond milk, and you can make it in any concentration you want. So one of the reasons, besides the fact that they're not very good, that you can't use commercial almond milks, is they're too thin to use for the orjat that I do. So I can make this as thick as I want.
I can add as much of this almond stuff as I want. So now I just take the the jam. Uh now I use seedless because I'm not going to strain it. This joy product, boom, hot water, boom. Blend it, Arabic and Xanthan so that it doesn't separate over time, done.
So now what used to take me soaking the almonds overnight, blending, squeezing, straining, hours and hours and hours is now a five-minute problem. Thank you, Joe. Yeah. Yeah. So that's my that was my exciting food news of the week.
And for some reason, I think because they're health folks, they have no, they have no, they've not done any outreach to the bar world at all. And like all of us who like are Orjah people, like this is this is like handed from God. You know what I mean? This idea. But uh, whatever.
So I'm gonna see if we can work with them maybe. Anyway, so Nastasi and I went to uh Athens. She went to the islands afterwards. I had to come back because whatever, you know, family, all this crap. But it turns out we were in Athens for the weirdest slice of time ever.
We were there for the one week the bank shut down. Oh, that was that was an interesting time to be there. Yeah, yeah. It was uh it was kind of hardcore. So, like we, you know, my only concept of Athens is this incredibly weird time and just feeling really, really bad about the austerity measures that were being put, because it seemed to me to be completely just insane what was being done to Greece.
You know what I mean? Like it was a social experiment. Yeah, horrifying. Yes. You know, in terms of like, you know, shops shuttered and like uh, you know, things unavailable.
Clumsy's was opening, which was nice. They let me use their bar, which is a great book. My prep is a big thing. It is a great bar, yeah. But anyway, so like that's my only reference for Athens, is this is this time.
And so reading your book, this new book, what's interesting about it isn't just that it's a perspective on what's going on in Athens now, but it's a book about how uh Athens is not a static entity. It's not. Uh and it's well, at least that's what I got out of the book, is like as the main theme of it is kind of uh breadth of people, breadth of change, and how even over the course of your time there, your time even as a cook and a journalist there, since you moved back in the 90s, I want to say, if my memory serves me right from the book, uh, that it's changed dramatically over that period of time. It's changed dramatically. I moved, uh I didn't move back, I moved there.
Back is here for me. Oh, back is here, right? Right. So you grew up here, but also in the islands, right? Or not?
I grew up here and I spent most almost every summer of my teen my adolescence on this island called Icaria, uh, which is now a blue zone. And now it's sort of been catapulted to this unexpected fame because people tend, you know, the rumor has it that we live a long time. That's the statistics. So those things are always fake. I mean, I'm sure hopefully you live a long time.
Yeah, it's I mean, there's a lot of statistical evidence to back it up. But anyway. You remember like in the in the remember in like the I think it was the late 70s, early 80s, they had the Dan and Yogurt ads, and they went to Geor Georgia, yeah, the caucuses. And they they were like, if you eat Dan and yogurt, you're gonna live to be 110, like all these people in Georgia. And it turns out none of those people were actually 110.
They just lived to be 110. Remember this? No, we have a few people who are in their you know, early hundreds on the island. But uh anyway, so I that's what my kind of Greek connection, and I moved there in 1992 full-time. Uh after, you know, spending my summers in this place that was you know, defined by the one word that it has become to define my own life, which is serendipitous.
Um, there was no way that I could buy into, let's say, the more rigid structures of life in the United States to a certain degree, uh, which is fine. But you know, New York is in its own place altogether. But tell me about it. Yeah, it's I mean, I'm a I'm totally a New Yorker still. Uh, but I've been in Athens since 1992, and when I moved there, the play the city was starting to go through the first sort of transformation, which was the gym my generation, say Greeks who had been uh brought up there who had left to study abroad coming back.
And as they came back, they had life experiences that their parents, you know, obviously didn't. So they were suddenly there was this demand for all sorts of cuisines that didn't exist before. Um and I got my job as a newspaper reporter by writing to the editor of the biggest, the largest Greek daily in Athens at the time, saying, you know, I've been uh my in-laws are like avid readers of your newspaper, and I noticed that your food column, which is LA Times syndicated uh and coming to Athens, is sort of completely useless here because we can't find any of the ingredients. So there's a saying in Greek: if you want to get hired for a job, criticize the employer. Uh does not work here.
No, no, it doesn't. Uh anyway, so I got hired. They called me up, and I I ended up uh working. I I was a food columnist and restaurant critic for 20 years in Athens. So I lived through this incredibly interesting time as the city was shifting out of you know, the post-junta years, and there was all this money from the EU coming into the city.
It was kind of this euphoria. Um, and then leading up to the Olympics in 2004, uh, kind of another transformation suddenly became very sexy to be a chef. You know, being a chef, being a cook was something you never wished on your kid. Same here, but yeah. It was the thing that you know, the the stupid kid in the family had to do because there was no nowhere else for you know that that person to go.
But that's certainly not the case anymore. And it was really fun time. It was Athens at that time was going through this crazy kind of Californianization of Greek food. Like you'd go to restaurants and the waiter would come over to you and say, you know, the the the chilled green sauce should be white swiped into the hot red sauce, and you pick up, you know, this piece of veal on the left tyne of your fork kind of thing. You know, well no, I caught through the uh intro that you uh you give it you have a rather uh jaundist view of some of the trends that happened uh during during that that time.
Which, you know, listen, any trend always goes to excess. Yeah, you know what I mean? Any trend goes to excess. Um what I like to talk about, and then people like I don't know, people always comment, like, what the hell are you talking about? I talk about what I grew up with here in the 70s and 80s, right?
And so you're even though you were actually here during that time, when you move back there, you're talking to a generation that was doing stuff back then, or these kind of like old school recipes. And so one of them was this uh Athenian housewives false souffle, the Athenian mayonnaise, and the chicken milanese, like these three, because first of all, John, this chicken milanese is not what you think. No, it has nothing to do with Milan. Yeah, there's no breading, there's no frying. So it's it's not even like you know, like like a Mexican milanese, which is not like what it's like everyone's milanese is some sort of fried cutlet, right?
Right. Nope. Okay. Nope. You want to describe what this is?
Why why is it called this anyway? I think if our if memory serves me uh correctly, I think it was named that by one of the probably the the one chef and cookbook author who really changed uh Greek cooking in the 20th century, a man named Nikos Telemendez. And he basically brought European techniques to Greek cooking. And it was a time, you know, this sort of part of the whole bourgeois cuisine uh, you know, concept or development, whatever. And that, you know, that's sort of kind of started in the early part of the 20th century when Greece was a new state and there was a lot of optimism in the air, and people wanted to look west.
Um so they this embrace of you know French techniques and all sorts of other things. So this is essentially a rice dish with uh very delicious creamy sauce on top of it, and it's usually molded in a like a bunt pan kind of mold. And that was um that that bunt pan was the treasured possession of upper crust and middle class Greek housewives, or let's say home cooks. And the same one that we use, Nordic brand, like almost, or like whatever they had. Whatever they have.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know the I don't remember, I don't know the brands, but um, and it was the thing that you would present on a Sunday or for a special meal or a family meal. But there are certain recipes, uh the false souple was this false soup souffle was something I remember my mother-in-law making. And I kind of named it false souffle because it was it's really almost like a bread pudding, and you know, it's it's this weird concocture. It's delicious, actually.
If you're if you guys can't picture, you don't have the book in front of you, folks, but it's like imagine like a casserole dish, layers of white bread, ham and cheese, white bread, and I forget, is there a bechamel on top or not? I think there's a bechamel, yeah. Yeah. Well, you're so you said that you pronounce his name again. This guy was the guy that brought bechamel to Greek.
He was the telemendes, was the man who brought bechamel to bechamel. Yeah, yeah. And also, I mean, his book, his name is synonymous with cookbook. Like when you say in Greek, like I say to people, I write telemendeves. You know, I write cookbooks, it's synonymous.
Really? Yeah. To this day. To this day. And there wasn't a household in Greece that didn't have, you know, a uh version of his book.
And the f and the other recipe, uh, which is uh one of the classics of bourgeois cooking is the what you call the Athenian mayonnaise, which is essentially poached fish. But the the preparation of the mayonnaise was the test of the you know the home cook's skill. Because it's hard to make mayonnaise. It's one of the harder things that let's say to do in the kitchen if you're not a professional cook. So that was the you know, that was her pride and joy, the the ability to make this delicious mayonnaise, and then decorate the fish.
It was it's a lovely dish. It's it's really festive. So there's a picture of it in the book. If you can't if so if picture this, it's you you poach the fish in cheesecloth, you then pull it out, you flake it, mix it with the mayonnaise, and then reassemble it in the shape of a fish, with the like as like a mayonnaise, fish salad, but not like chomp not chummed up, like large flakes, it says in the book, but you leave the tail in the head so that it still looks like a fish. And it's usually made with grouper, which is an expensive fish and a delicious one.
And it's uh to my knowledge, the only recipe that actually has the name Athenian in it. So it's called that even this. It's called Athinaikima Yonesa, yeah. And it refers to them, it's funny, it does it's not called fish, right? It's called mayonnaise.
Yeah, you're calling it the mayonnaise and not the fish, which I thought was, you know, bizarre. I thought that you it was just gonna be a recipe for the mayonnaise, and that here is a here is a serving suggestion for said mayonnaise. No, it's no, no, no. It's it's it's about the fish, but uh that's an interesting point, actually. Uh yeah, and then you decorated, and that was also sort of a uh uh a way for her to show off her skills too, decorating it with capers and cornichons and you know the boiled vegetables that went into those soup.
Right, right. So instead of fins on the on the upper and lower section or like the like uh slivered onions from the from the bra in the book. Um but um yeah. So like I love stuff like that. Like recipes like that, that you're like, oh right.
So then uh let me mention some of the oh there's there's this one restaurant when Nastasi and I were in Greece that we went to that was probably the highlight of our dining experience because they cared so little whether we were there or not. And they they still feel that way. Yeah, so it's this place, uh uh is it well, I I would say the port. How do you call it? It's called the Porto.
Yeah, and so if you're in Athens, apparently it still exists. It still exists, it's been under risk of uh extinction for the last two years because that part of the city is now being turned into one giant boutique hotel. And yeah, all this, you know, funds coming in, buying up, you know, whole city blocks, that kind of thing. So for reference as an American, uh when I went, there was no sign, nothing. There still isn't.
You're on the street, there's stairs down, you walk down the stairs into this like I don't know, what I my memory is that it looks like it's been hacked out of the little rock or something. You go down in and uh and you sit down, there's paper on the table, they bring you some food because I can't speak, so they bring me food, and then they write on the table how much money I owe them, and then you get out. Yeah, that's it. That's still it. And I've been I've been going there since I got to Greece, you know, 33 years ago.
And there used to be a couple of places like that in the neighborhood. He's the only survivor. And he his specialty, he makes the best chickpea soup. He makes really great, simple, super simple grilled sardines, a great Greek salad. You know, he makes other things too, but those are the things you go there for.
And he's still very gruff and very rough around the edges, and he doesn't like when you take pictures in the place. And his nephew, he's been there running that place since 1951. Wow. He makes his own retzina. Uh talk about that later.
Yeah, outside of Athens. And you get there, but he has kind of a heart of gold, he just doesn't show it. Like if you if you get on his good side, he'll he's he turns into a total, you know, sort of pussy cat. Just you know, real softy. But he's a little bit gruff, and he, you know, he's just a character.
I mean, he's part of the fabric of of Central Athens. Mitsos, Barba Mitsos, Uncle, Uncle Dimitri, Barba Mitsos. Well, hopefully, uh, hopefully they can maintain withstand the withstand the pressures of boutique hotels. Um, all right. Oh, another thing.
So I was watching some of your uh episodes last, and this chef is actually featured a lot in this book. I'm gonna mispronounce his name, Lefteris. Lefter is Lazaru. Yeah. Yeah.
Uh and so, John, you're gonna like this. Obviously, this is a book, a Greek book. There's gonna be a lot of like squid and octopus and fish in the book. You know, duh. Duh.
But this guy has this really cool technique for squid that you're gonna appreciate, John. I think all our listeners appreciate this. So he takes the first of all, interesting fact, he takes the tentacles and puts them. He's a flash cooker, right? So he he's a fast squid man, not a long squid.
Yeah, he's a fast squid. He's a fast quid. Two seconds or two hours. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So he's like, you know, shh anyway, so tentacles flash.
He's a he's tentacles first because they cook longer, he says, right? Uh marinate a little olive oil in the in the tentacles first before he puts it on the on the thing so that it's all coated, then puts it into the into the pan, cast iron, if my memory serves, maybe maybe it was steel, I don't remember. But he takes the tubes, he sticks a spatula into the tube, right? If you picture this, and then he takes the knife and he cuts down to the spatula so that the squid is still whole, but it's been scored all the way through so that it gets this kind of ruffled look on the top, and it can cook more on the inside with the fast cooking he's doing. The flavors can get inside better because the squid's been penetrated on the one side, but they're not hacked up into little tubes.
So we can still present it on, I believe it was a puree like spanicopata base, right? That he shocked. I appreciated that he ice shocked the stuff to make it stay green. This is what happens. People they they cook a green and then they think they can just blend it and walk away from it.
It's gonna turn olive drab on you. This is a well-known fact for anyone who's ever actually tried to make anything. You know what I mean? Yeah. But anyway, but anyway, so like very, very bright green.
So uh I'm sure that tasted good, that dish. It was delicious, and it was really easy to make. Yeah, well, with a couple of tricks. With a couple of tricks, yeah. That's like the other squid trick that my my sister-in-law, Miley, uh, was taught by her uh French cooking uh professor at the French Culinary Institute, uh, was if you're gonna stuff squid, turn them inside out.
Oh, really? Yeah, then the the the little the little what are you, the ears, whatever you want to call them, the they're on the inside now. And then when it when it's turned inside out and it contracts, it contracts around the filling better. So he used to turn all of his uh all of them inside. Now remember, they were using the ones that are like this, like the, you know, uh not the little ones.
Also, uh on octopus, I had this question. Um in in Greece, when you buy uh an octopus, has it have they already beaten the ever loving crap out of it? Or do you have to beat them? No, it's already been beaten. And you also mentioned, because I think most people here when you buy octopus, you just buy octopus.
But you're mentioning like the types of octopus that that you're buying. So I'm I'm taking it that buying an octopus in Greece, like you have a much better idea of what you're buying than when you buy it here, where you're mostly buying I mean, is it all frozen there as well, like it is here? Uh it depends. It's not easy to find fresh octopus. It has to be very local.
Um most of it actually is fished on the other side of the Mediterranean. Uh you buy it at the fish market. The fish market, you know, the fishmongers are infamous for being a little bit, let's say, creative in how they present things. So uh you quite you never quite know. But I can tell you one thing that doesn't happen when I at least when I buy octopus in Greece.
Whenever I've cooked octopus in, you know, sort of restaurant kitchens in New York or anywhere else in the in North America, oftentimes you get this octopus that looks like a total monster, like the tentacles are this thick, and as soon as you start heating it, it gets it's reduced down to nothing. It's like injected with saline. I don't know what I think those giant Pacific octopus, they just why you know you do the do they do that in Greece where you do the dip where you dip it in and have it curl into the you you you You dip it into what? Boiling water so that it curls a certain way, and then you you do you do that? Not that I know, not that I know about it.
That might just be because we use these giant things that get tiny. I don't know. But I don't know. I always thought it was I thought there was a more devious reason for that. But in Greece, you know, you we first of all, you don't typically the traditional way of cooking octopus is not with any liquid.
You let you you cook it in very slowly in a covered pan, maybe with a little olive oil. I saw that in the one in the thing you did for your daughter's art buddies. And oh, you watch the you're a you're a good one. I do my work. Yeah, you did your homework.
Uh yeah, that was a that's a great recipe too. Um oranges. John, get this. Chops up oranges, so after it cooks down a little bit, as she says, no liquid, no salt, which I thought was. No salt, no salt.
I mean, I would have to try it. I have a tough time believing. I I'm just telling you, I have a tough time believing. I love salt, but for some reason the octopus in Greece does not need to be salted. Okay.
Okay. You know what? Okay. Uh so you're saying maybe an American octopus, the way it's been treated might need a little salt. Yeah, or maybe the water's different.
The salinity levels are different. I'm not sure. Packs up oranges. Uh I think squeezes the juice in, puts the orange slices in, and then you serve it with the orange slices. So you eat a piece of the bitter braised orange, like navel style.
They're not like uh fancy aren't cias, right? They're not sour oranges. They're like, yeah. No. Yeah.
Yeah. But it's good. It's delicious. Huh. Yeah.
All right. I'll give it a I mean, like I don't cook octopus as much as I as I would, even though my son loves it. But my son just wants it plain. That's the problem. He just eats like plain.
He wants it very lightly cooked and plain. So yeah, so you put the octopus in and it shrinks, but not an intense amount, but it does make its own juice. It makes its own juice. And they say in Greek that it you it cooks in its own seawater. Yeah, yeah.
It's it's very poetic. Now that that recipe cooked for about 45 minutes, right? Yeah, it depends on the octopus, but that's about right. I mean, if it's say like a two-pound, two and a half pound octopus, that's about right. Yeah.
Now now see what you think about this. I actually think for the octopus that we get, because I don't think that they I don't think that they're throwing all the octopus in a in a washing machine here that they sell you. I think they freeze it. I think the freezing helps tenderize it. I think also with our squid.
I think one of the reasons that it's easier for an American to make a quote unquote tender squid is that all of it's been frozen. Yeah. All of it. And so the freezing, you know, breaks apart the muscle, and it's like a tenderizing akin to old school beating it. You know what I mean?
But I can't prove that because I don't have a source of unfrozen octopus and squid. You know what I mean? So I don't know. Um, but anyway, another thing I thought was interesting looking at the book that struck me and also watching the the shows and from when I visited the Mediterranean, is that they love to sell local small fish in full rigor. Full rigor.
Like so, like you see them pick up the fish and it looks like uh it looks like a banana because it's still in rigor mortis. You know what I mean? From uh when that when they caught it. And it's like uh it's like is that just a Mediterranean cultural thing? Or do you not did you not notice it?
To me, it's like shocking because all the fish that you buy in the United States are limp. They've all been caught, they've gone through rigor mortis already, and when you buy them, they're like that that they're just not fresh that way. Well, but that's the thing. So like it's it's a cultural thing. So, right, so like you know, in places in China, they they want it, they want to eat it, basically kill it and eat it, right?
They want it that fresh. To me, and then like there's okay, it's in rigor, it's a certain point. Well, like a lot of fish I like it after it's relaxed, right? So, but just interesting cultural differences of how you how you like the texture of your fish. I never thought about that.
It's so second nature to me. I mean, I wouldn't even look at a fish that was limp. Really? Yeah, it's so funny. Yeah, because you see these like this, like, you know, the ice can, and then the fish are like Yeah, that's how they should.
That's how they should be. I mean, that's how you know they're fresh. Yeah, you'll never see that at a market here, not ever. But am I right, John? You'll never see that in a market.
No, good. No, you don't even see whole fish in markets here. I mean, no, I mean you do in some specialty markets. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah.
No, but it's uh it's an interesting thing, like what people like. So like we're so akin, we're so used to thinking what is better, what's best. But it's to me, everything is just cultural differences. And so when you look at them, you know, you're trying to figure out, okay, well, if this is how this person wants this, like what what is the dish gonna taste like based on what they're doing? You know what I mean?
To me, that's like half of the that's a lot of the interesting uh stuff. And so to that, I will ask you this because can I can I interrupt you for one second? I have a funny story about Leftetis Lazaro, which we traveled to Japan together once on a with the International Aval Council, and we ended up in this restaurant. There were about 10 Greeks. We couldn't get into any restaurants because we were all there were too many of us and we were too loud.
So finally we got into a place and we ordered many things. They were all chefs, so we ordered like the entire menu three times. But one of one of the menu items was a whole fish that came to the table. And when they when Leftetis went to slice it, it jumped. Oh my goodness.
It was for the Greeks, that was kind of a shocking moment. And then, you know, we kind of got on with it and it was delicious. But anyway, that's my Yeah, no, it's fine. Yeah, it's with uh yeah, I've I was Nastasi and I, who unfortunately she can't be on the phone, were taught how to do the live fish by someone, and it just horrified me. It was just horrifying.
I mean, I'll listen, we kill fish all the time in horrible ways, but it was still horrifying. You know what I mean? Like, but uh, but again, it's cultural. So like, you know, what's horrifying to me is normal to somebody else, and I'm sure many of the I'm sure a lot of the things I do are horrifying to other people. Uh but uh so one of the, you know, uh I get f you know, FOMO, which is fear of missing out, right?
So like one of the may one of the major uh FOMO situations from reading your book is like uh just the breadth of Greek cheeses. You mention all of these Greek cheeses. Like you have this uh this egg dish from uh the cyclot the cycladic eggs, and in it you're like, oh yeah, there's this cheese. You can only get it on the islands. You're ruined, you're toast.
It's delicious, by the way. And I'm like, ah you know what I mean? There's a lot of cheese in Greece. Yeah, because we know we mainly we get like two or three. Yeah, you know what I mean.
Because it's a hard thing to import. Uh you it takes a whole army of people educating Americans, you know, how to pronounce half this stuff, how to explain that this cheese, you know, the traditional way of making it is to dig a pit and soak it in the leaves at the bottom of, you know, fill the this pit with the dredge at the bottom of a wine barrel, put the cheese in there, cover it, leave it there for six months, and enjoy it. I want that. I I want that too. I want that.
And I I found that on the island of uh Sifnos many years ago, like 30 30 years ago. We were in this little place in a small village, and we ordered just like eggs and a salad or something. And the grandfather, it was one of these family places that probably doesn't exist anymore, with a little cot in the back of the, you know, the the coffee, the cafe neo. The grandfather was asleep on the cot, he got up, he sat down, the daughter-in-law, you know, prepared his meal, and part of this meal was this wine-soaked cheese. So I asked her, you know, what's papu there eating?
You know, what's grandpa eating? And oh, that's that's local, you're not gonna be interested in that. I was like, You said the wrong thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh anyway, so yeah, there's a lot of cheese.
I mean a lot. Yeah, so you always give things to kind of mimic, but like, you know, even here, I think, you know, I mean, even even our most of the feta we get's not very good. You know what I mean? Like here in this in the US. I mean, I'm sure some of it's fine.
Some I'm sure some of it's good. But yeah, I mean, if you go to the Greek markets, and there's there are a few brands in you know, sort of mainstream supermarkets that are very good. But there's a lot of variety in feta. Like one of the things I do when I take people around Athens, I'll bring them to a couple of cheese shops and I'll have them taste just feta. And there's firm feta, there's sharp feta, there's smooth feta, there's creamy feta, there's mild feta.
Well, that's another thing is like you have a lot of sauces in here with with their cream sauces with fet feta melted into them, which is not something I would normally associate, because I think of it as getting soft, but I don't think of it as like being completely creamed out or blended into a sauce. Do you, John? No. No. Not usually, yeah.
But but like there's m I would say more than 10 recipes in here that involve or maybe maybe it's like six or seven, but like where feta is put into a cream base or into a sauce base. Like you have one where you make a roux, then milk, then feta. You have like a another one like with uh pancakes where it's like a feta cream in the morning. It's like, you know, these these so it's like I never think of feta as something that is meltable in that way. Yeah.
But even ours that are so salted and brine soaked are. I mean, are you talking about the stuff that's made in Wisconsin or the stuff that's imported? Because the stuff that's made in Wisconsin is not cheese. Wow. Um serious shade on Wisconsin.
Do you know that they call themselves cheese heads? I mean, uh some of it, uh you know, it's cow's milk for the most part. So that makes it that's not feta. Feta is by law in at least in the EU, but in Greece, it's by lost sheep or sheep and goat's milk. Are you okay with other countries in the region's feta?
Like I know Bulgarians think their feta is quite good. You didn't hear that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, those those mountains re Bulgaria borders Greece. A hundred years ago, the shepherds were crossing those mountains.
They weren't thinking about, oh, now I'm entering Greek territory or now I'm entering Bulgarian territory. It's it's mountains. Right. Same cheese culture for that. Yeah, same cheese culture.
Many of the a lot, same similar food cultures, uh especially around the you know, sort of frontier areas, borders. Yeah. So man, now if I ever get to go back to Greece, I gotta do gotta go. I know first of all, I didn't leave Athens, so I didn't get to I didn't go to any other place. But uh I gotta get I gotta get these cheese.
I gotta go with some of these dairies in here. Yeah, there's a lot of I mean, Greeks have been making cheese, you know, for since like the Bronze Age. A lot of experience. A lot of experience. Uh so another thing that you mentioned, uh ingredient that piqued my interest is pine honey.
Now my favorites. Yeah, I know so. Of course, oh immediately it piqued my interest because of course pine trees don't have flowers. So how do they have honey? And it's a honeydew honey.
Crazy. You want to talk about it? I do. Yeah. Uh you're a smart cookie.
Yeah. I'm a I'm a technical guy. I'm a yeah, yeah. So pine honey is you're right, pine trees don't flower. They the bees feed off of this parasite that lives on the bark of the tree, and it it secretes a very sweet liquid, sticky liquid, and that's what the bees feed off of.
But pine honey is um, I think the the it has the highest concentration of minerals of all the honeys. It's very dark. I mean, my experience with honey is mostly because I'm sh I'm biased, I like my the honey from Ikaria. Um but and it's mostly pine honey. There's some incredible heather honey in Icaria too.
And some thyme. But pine honey is a dark honey. It's very viscous. Uh I love the flavor of it. It's very mineraly.
Um it's not bitter like buckwheat honey. It's not bitter honey. We do have some bitter honeys in Greece. We have chestnut honey, which is bitter. We have honey from the strawberry tree, the arbitration, which is bitter and very therapeutic, very good for you.
And uh and we also have some oak honey. Huh. Um, but the pine honey is probably the most prevalent honey in Greece. Because I mean, until it all burns down, it's mostly pine forests. So got, you know, knock on wood.
No, it's cool, it's cool concepts like bug on bug takes two different species of bug or whatever parasite, yeah. Right. It's yeah, it's uh it's it's the most prevalent honey in Greece. I mean, uh I'm gonna, but that I could probably pick up here. Oh, yeah, you can find pine honey here.
And I'm sure it, I'm sure, you know, honey ships quite well. So I'm sure I can get a decent quality. Oh, yeah, you I I I can ship you some pine honey. Yeah, well, nice, appreciate that. Uh another thing I want to talk about because as an American growing up in around New York area is a Greek salad, right?
So I John, do people still order Greek salads all the time here? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, like, you know, obviously, like growing up 70s, 80s, 90s, Greek diners, Greek salad. But in the US, I mean, it's it's gotta be, it's not the same, you know, right? I mean, like, first of all, you would never have like canned uh, you know, canned uh dolmas on them, or you know, like the face you're making, right? Uh but one thing that's interesting is that in your book, or maybe it was on the show, you're like, you know, these are the things you need. You need the tomato, you need the pepper, you need um, and you need uh feta, but oregano without oregano f you, right?
Not the right thing. But no anchovies. None of the none of the ones have the anchovies in here, and I always order extra anchovies online. Is that just an American Greek diner thing? Uh I'm not I don't know about that.
I think the additions are generally American. Uh Greek salad, like what we call village salad, Jatikisalad, that was actually born in the placa in sort of like the night early 1960s. And it was totally a financial thing. There were price controls on restaurant menu items, and they could charge more for a sal for for what they called a tomato cucumber salad if they put cheese on it. It sort of fell in this gray area and it was out of the price controls, so they were able to like be a little bit more creative with what they could charge for it.
And when that moved to the United States, there are lots of versions of that in the States. First of all, most of it most of it comes packed, most of it is over a bed of lettuce. Yeah. And I think that's just the American tendency to want, you know, more and make something look bigger. Yeah, thin thin onions.
Yeah, thin onions, you know, tasteless tomatoes for the most part. It's a part of the horrible tomatoes. Yeah, it's supposed to be a seasonal salad. So if you you know, why are Greek restaurants in the United States, especially in the Northeast, serving Greek salads in January? Yeah, no, the tomatoes are hard like apples.
You know, so any anyway, that's all that's my little sort of pet peeve. But now you can get decent hot house like the comparis and the small tomato that are good, you know, don't are they the best tomato on earth? No. No, but they're decent. Yeah, yeah, they're decent.
Yeah, yeah. You know, um but then in other parts of the states, like in Tarpon Springs, Florida, a Greek salad has a scoop of potato salad in it. What? Yeah. Because that was the Greek restaurants there.
There were a lot of GIs coming home after the war, and that was a way to give them sort of something more substantial. They were kind of, you know, they were financially strapped, and that was a way to make a relatively inexpensive dish more filling for them. So that took on sort of a life of its own. And then you have all these embellishments grilled chicken, you know, uh grilled grilled uh shrimp over a Greek salad, anchovies. In Greece, you do find anchovies.
You find, you know, depending on like there are some regional distinctions. You might find different cheese, not feta. If you're in Crete, for example. You might find anchovies in it, you might find capers in it, you might find maybe a different kind of olive in it. Um you might find pepperoncini, not everyone.
You put it in yours. I like because I like heat. I mean, and that's not even real heat, but I like I like spices. Vinegary heat, yeah. Yeah.
So I'm I yeah, I don't know why I'm asking this, but I'm curious. Like, I never did the research on the Greek diner in the US. I don't know the date. Like, when did all of that start? The Greek diner.
Was that as a result of the 20s when when all the everything was hitting the fan in in Greece and Turkey, or when was the Greek diner born? Uh post-war, post-World War II. I think it was post-World War II. I think there was definitely a moratorium on immigration between like the 1890s and the 19. I'm sorry, there was a moratorium between the twenties and the six the 1960s.
So people from Southern Europe were kind of not exactly welcome in the United States. There was a trickle of immigration, but it wasn't, you know, sort of these massive waves of immigration that saw that were that we saw at the turn of the 19th century, the tw turn of the 20th century. Um and then after the war in the 1960s, things opened up again, and a lot of, you know, Greece was really poor. So a lot of people, and you know, some one of the there's so many rags to riches stories about men who came over, uh worked as dishwashers. Greeks are Greeks don't like to have bosses.
So it's that's a cultural thing. So, you know, you work as a dishwasher, you save your pennies. You live with you know, 12 other guys in the basement of some Greek aunt's house, you know, somewhere in Lowell, Massachusetts, or you know, Long Island or something. You save your pennies, you buy the diner. And then, you know, you save more pennies, you buy a second diner, you sell that one, you buy a bigger one.
And that's kind of and everyone in the family works. So it's okay to work with your family, just not a boss who's not your family. Right. Exactly. No, I even know someone who's, you know, my age who for a while had to run the family diner, even though it's like it was like two generations.
I should have asked him, I haven't seen him in years. Anyway, uh, I mean And also Greeks are like we're the one of the cultural things about Greeks is that we we love to feed people. It's a very hospital hospitality is a really deep felt sentiment in Greek culture. I think that's one of the reasons why they've done, you know, we've done so well in the restaurant industry. We actually like to feed people.
Wow. Good. Uh now, terra musselata. One of the recipes in here, because I didn't, you know, again, you have a breadth of terra muscaladas, right? You do this seltzer, and the secret of the place I buy it here in the city is seltzer.
I get it from the international grocery over. Yeah, I don't know if you like them or hate it. Yeah, yeah. But uh are you pro the seltzer, the lightening it up with salsa or no? It does make it fluffier, definitely makes it fluffier.
And you're the first one you present is a zero potato situation. Like no no filler, no bread, no potato, right? It's just oil, ter uh it's an emulsion, basically. Yeah, right. I forget the exact recipe.
It's lemon, it's teram teram terama, or however you pronounce it. Hey, I'll go look it up. Uh but it's yeah, it's very pure, the first recipe that you gave. So you don't you in when you make it no additives, and also you don't use the orange ones. You use the the the I try to get the white one.
That's a little harder to find in the States. Uh maybe you find it. Is there a flavor difference? There's not really a flavor difference, but the pink one might be a bit saltier. I'm not I'm not certain about that.
Uh there are a lot of different recipes for tarmasalata, and it's also one taramah, which is the name of the fish row, is one of those things now that has become fodder for like creative cooking in Athens. And I have one recipe that is a tar masalata with a sweet potato base. Yeah, I don't know. You get a lot not a lot, but you're like talk about sweet potatoes being popular there. Yeah, it's I'm trying to picture sweet potatoes in Greek, like I'm trying to picture Greek sweet potatoes.
I have a difficult time picturing sweet potatoes other than just roasted sweet potatoes. Oh no, that's me though. It's personal with like oregano, garlic, and lemon. Really? They're delicious.
Yeah, I need to get I need to up my sweet potato gain. Do you know? I only eat it around Thanksgiving time. I really do need it. No, it's actually good for you.
It's I mean, yeah, I just like you know, I love uh, you know, I the issue is is people try to put a sweet potato in, like, turn it into a French fry. I'm like, let us sweep well, let a sweet potato be a sweet potato. Let a French fry be a French fry. You know what I mean? I don't know.
But that's me. I'm not speaking for other people, because John, you like sweet potatoes, right? Yeah. But I probably don't have them in enough variety of ways. And would you have thought of making uh teramo salata with uh sweet potato?
No. No. You would not. No, I would not have. Yeah.
But you say this is something that's actually currently made in Athens, popular in Athens, which I think is interesting. And I've had one, there's also a recipe for sweet potato for I'm sorry, tar musselath with tomato paste. Oh, yeah, I saw that, but it's a little bit of tomato paste. Yeah. And you said it it really makes a nice like color.
What was there? Anyway, so like this is a breadth of things that I would not have known. By the way, John, whole chapter on dips. Ooh, love that. Whole chapter, dips.
Apparently, dips, big deal, right? Or not? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. We love bread.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, all right, I'll say. So, oh, another thing FOMO'd out, which this I'm sure I can get here. I'm gonna mispronounce it. Trahana.
Trahana. All right, talk to me about this product. Okay, trahana is ancient. It was a way to preserve milk. It's made, there are a lot of different ways to make it, but generally, the the whole uh concept is you take grain, mu wheat, essentially, either flour or cracked wheat or bulgar.
You cook it in some milk of choice. It could be goat's milk, it could be uh buttermilk, it could be yogurt. There are also Lenten versions that are like dairy-free, but I don't want to confuse people. You cook it, it becomes like overcooked clumpy oatmeal. You break up those clumps, you dry them in under the Greek sun at the end of the summer when the sun's really hot, usually on some sort of screen, you turn them so that they dry on all sides, you keep them covered to keep the flies away.
And then you press that through a fine mesh sieve. And you know, there there are now commercial uh uh ways to do it, you know, faster ways to do it. But uh, and it was a way to preserve dairy, and that is cooked up most traditionally just as a simple porridge. It could be the breakfast porridge that was like the country farmer's breakfast. Um now it's this something that's also captured imaginations in among younger chefs.
And it's cooked up in all sorts of ways. It makes a delicious soup. There are two versions of it, two general versions. One is sweet and one is sour. The sweet is not exactly sweet, it's just not sour.
Let's say it's bland. It's blander. So but is it is it does it have like a barnyard aroma, like a lot of like dried milk yes, and it's delicious. I I like barnyard, it's delicious. Umami, it's got umami.
How thick do you make the porridge? Like I'm trying to picture it. That's completely up to you. Uh, usually it's pretty thick. It's like sort of like oatmeal, about the consistency of oatmeal.
And you reconstitute it with water. Water or stock, if you want. It depends. You know, it's and you can buy a decent of that here? You can buy a decent trahana here, yeah.
You can buy the sour version and the sweet version, and it's made all over, it's made all over the eastern Mediterranean. It's called tarcana in other places. It's the name is onomatopea for like crunchy pebbly. Uh, all right. Well, that's another one I gotta try it.
It's great. John, here's a crazy recipe that you're gonna enjoy. So, and this I'm asking this for a particular reason. So there's a uh it's called lemon chicken ribs in the in the book. So from what I gather, you take the thighs.
So when I take thighs, what I do, I take the bone, I run the knife down the bone, then I put the I put it, the knife under the bone and blast off the knuckle on either side, and then cut off the little piece of cartilage. I have a boneless thigh. Here, shoop, shoop, and then you cut the flaps off. What do you use the flaps for? Because you're just eating the the little ribblet that you make with the thing.
What do they do with the rest of the thigh meat? I I don't know. Uh maybe, I don't know. Uh, you caught me off guard on that one. But that recipe was one of those things when I first moved to Greece, and we'd go to you know, Taverna's, and there'd be chicken, katopolo, katopolo paidakia, chicken ribs on the menu.
It was a running joke for me. Like chick they don't chickens don't have ribs. What are we eating here? Like, what is this? Yeah.
And yeah, and it's just that's what it is. It's it's strips of chicken, basically. Strip strips of thigh. Yeah, then like uh the the lemon goes in in the marinade, right? So it's before it's before you cook it.
So they cooks with the lemon. It I think so. Yeah, yeah, I gotta remember. It's the olive oil and lemon juice in the marinade. Right.
Maybe a little mustard too. Right. So the in other words, the acids tenderizing when it before, and then you it's like it's uh like braised out with the potatoes, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
That was an interesting idea because uh and then but I'm thinking like, what do you do with the rest? You make a salad. And you know what? I hate to say this. There are people in my family who prefer chicken salad made with the white meat, but it's not me though.
That's not me. I I mean, like, I'm obviously a thigh guy. You know what I mean? Like thigh, like i if they could grow a chicken that was just skin and thigh, I would be happy. You know what I mean?
Like those are my favorite uh parts. All right. Going down the list of things uh that I thought were interesting, and you said this one was mentioned in the Michelin guide, but it looked interesting uh for a number of reasons. Was I'm gonna mispronounce this. I'm gonna just have you say this.
Mustokulura. Yeah, so you want to describe this cookie? So this cookie is made with uh either with petimesi or with grape must. And what's the what is the difference? Grape must obviously is just the juice before it starts to ferment, and the pet petimesi is what you you boil down that juice, so it's kind of comes almost like a syrup.
Uh of any consistency that you desire. It could be thick, could be thinner. And they make this cookie, this this bakery uh in the Mesoya region, which is in sort of the wine, let's say, region of Attica, right outside of Athens, um, is famous for these cookies. And it they it's they're in season in the road. Uh, and people kind of flock there from all over the city to just for these particular cookies.
Um how hard are they? They're they come in two versions. They're crunchy, and they're also they also make a softer one, almost like a spongy kind of consistency. Oh, because I was wondering, because there's this cookie that we make every uh around Christmas time that's like a Calabrian cookie that is just honey and flour, and it's like it'll break your teeth, but like you become addicted to it after a while. But um, so this is not like that.
Yeah, that's good. But like uh, it's like literally like how stiff can I make it before you know my arm breaks or my or my mixer breaks. It's just honey and flour, but this one's got oil, so this one's a lot lighter. It's lighter, yeah. And there it's usually it's it's a great cookie for coffee.
Uh they come in different shapes, you could usually rings or like little braids. Yeah, it's like it's a classic. Yeah. And here's another one. Amer American, uh, it's literally uh you open the book and it looks like 1970s America.
It's uh uh called Chicago Sunday, which I by the way, I did not know there was something with Chicago's and Sundays. Uh, but yeah, you want to talk about this? Yeah, that's uh when I first started going to Athens in uh I guess the 1970s. And then as I got a little older and was able to start going around by myself, um, you know, I met a boy, and the boy ended up being my husband, and we used to uh he you know, he was a native Athenian, and he would take me to all these places all over Athens. And at that time, in I guess it was the late 70s, there was this ice cream Sunday that everyone knew as Chicago.
And it was just one of those things that was part of the fabric of the, you know, the city at the time. And turns out that it was in fact uh brought over to Athens by somebody who went on to open one of the most uh successful and uh upscale um pastry and coffee uh cafes in the center of the city who had spent time in Chicago. And I think if memory uh serves me correctly, Chicago is also the birthplace of what we know as the Sunday. I mean, it could be, I don't know, you know, people claim a lot of things. I know, people claim well, let's just say it's true because that then that means that the whole the rest of my story makes sense then.
So uh so he brought this ice cream sundae over, and instead of calling it a Sunday, which would have sounded weird in Greek, right? He called it Chicago, which had sort of sex appeal for I mean, let's be honest, it sounds weird in English too. A Sunday or a Sunday, because it's A.E., what does that even mean? Yeah. What is that even nobody nobody knows?
Everyone that's why Tom Carvel used to be like Wednesday, Sunday at Carval. You know what I mean? Like it's crazy. He was Greek, by the way. Really?
Yeah. You know, we had someone on his show who worked for him who invented Fudgy the Whale and Cookie Puss. We had her on like maybe five years ago or six years ago. Yeah, amazing story. Car Carvel and the Dove the Dove Bar Guy was Greek.
Really? Yeah, Carvel, good. Yeah, I mean Carvel was that was our Sunday outing. We would go to H Howard Johnson's and the big old Chevy on Sundays, and that was like the our being socialized as Americans. Right, so you have Tom Carvell, Green.
And then on the way Jacques Papin. Right. Hojos. Exactly. And on the way back, we'd have to stop at Carvel because he's Greek.
Yeah, well, and because it was good. It was good, yeah. It still is to this day. The crunchy things that she invented, I forget her name, it's out of my head now. That they're delicious.
Yeah. Carvel delicious. Alright, listen. Uh on our way out. I didn't get to talk to you about carabrusks.
I wish I could, and like whether they're similar to the Italian rust that I'm, you know, used to cooking from uh or cooking with, but uh I'll leave on this on this. Rock Baker says uh we should bring back the pet peeves. Rock Baker's pet peeve is when someone lets a kitchen timer go off, but they don't immediately tell you and ask you what it was for so they can do something in the kitchen. They just wait till you show up in the kitchen like 10 minutes later and like your timer went off, and he gets very, or she gets very rock baker gets very mad. So, uh, do you have any pet peeves on the way out?
A kitchen pet peeves that you really hate. Uh I hate underseasoned food in restaurants. Oh, yeah. It is bad. It's bad.
It's bad. It it I think, yeah, it's terrible. All right, that's a good pet peeve. Uh Diane uh uh Cochillis, thank you for coming on. Thank you for having me.
Yeah, get Athens uh food stories and love, a cookbook, and watch the uh next season of uh My Greek Table coming up soon on PBS. October 24th, we roll out. All right, nice guy willing. Cooking issues. Thank you.
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