Cretan Cuisine Secrets: Foraging, Sea Urchins & Recipes
Dimos Balopoulos is a chef based in eastern Crete, and I remember him telling me how each winter his bosses send him around the world to work for short spells in top kitchens so that he could expand his kitchen’s repertoire. And if it’s good enough for a leading light like Dimos, it’s good enough for an amateur like me.
Indeed, one reason I was in Crete was to learn a bit more about how the Greeks in general — and the Cretans in particular — centre all their culinary practices on the quality of local ingredients.
The Tradition of Foraging for Wild Greens in Cretan Cuisine
Here’s an unlikely example which Cretan home-cooks share with their neighbours across the Aegean in Puglia — it concerns what they call “wild greens” (horta in Greece), plants which most English people would describe as weeds. As wild edible plants pop their heads above the rocky soil in both places, so they’ll be collected daily by men and women from the rural villages, and at weekends by those who live in towns.
“You can find many varieties in Crete which come out season by season,” says Dimos. “So what local people do is collect them and preserve them — you can’t eat all you pick. Some they pickle, others they salt or freeze. And they use them all year.”
He is talking about things like dandelion leaves, wild rocket, even thistle stalks. “First they put them in salt and then wash them and put them in (white wine) vinegar in a jar. That is happening in every Cretan farm because they cannot eat all they pick when it’s in season.”
And so the pickled vegetables — which are delicious — have become a feature of Cretan cuisine. One which a top chef like Dimos adapts and extends until pickled vegetables become a small but important signature of his five-star cooking.
Why Don’t We Pickle More Wild Vegetables in the UK?
Why aren’t we pickling wild vegetables? Why don’t we have that kind of foraging as part of our culinary tradition? Such things are a mystery to me. It’s not as if our forefathers always lived so high on the hog, they didn’t go hungry. Wild greens, seaweeds and other things besides were left untouched… We’ve got them, but for some reason the peasants of this land never ate them, no matter how desperate they became.
If I am wrong about that and they did — then how is it the routine never became a part of a tradition which saw the dishes being handed down?
Sea Urchins: The Flavour of the Cretan Sea
What I like about talking to chefs like Dimos is how linked with such tradition — and with such simple local ingredients — they seem to be. We were talking about eating sea-urchin — the spiny shellfish which he told me had become illegal to harvest in Crete. Not that this seems to stop anyone from gingerly picking them out of the rocks — indeed one cove I visited was black with them.
“With the sea urchins you are literally eating the sea when it comes to the flavour,” said Dimos. “We like them best simply eaten fresh on their own. But then we can adapt them into the sort of cooking we do here.”
A Global Culinary Perspective with Local Ingredients
“Every winter the hotel sends us around the world looking for fresh ideas. Last year we went to Oslo and worked there in a three-Michelin star restaurant called Maaemo. The year before we went to Copenhagen and worked at Kadeau. These are some of the very best restaurants in the world. So yes, we can say that we travel and pick up ideas — to see what is going on and to open our eyes.
“But then we bring those ideas back and use them with the ingredients we have here. It’s all about the ingredients. Crete is a really huge island and they can produce anything they want.”
The Mediterranean Influences on Cretan Cuisine
“Cretan food is more Mediterranean, than Greek,” said Dimos, which at first sounded strange but then I began to realise what he meant. Across the 300 kilometre long island you will see influences from the Middle East, North Africa and even Spain.
“The vegetables have more flavour than they do elsewhere in Greece because of the climate. Even a green pepper will not taste the same in other places. Here it is grown in the sunshine.”
Building Close Relationships with Local Food Producers
“What we do is call in all the producers to show us what they have — this is happening at the beginning of the season and we choose all the ingredients and make a deal with them for the whole year. We are one of the very few hotels doing that. We have this one day when they all come here — and we do a deal with the man, say, who is going to produce us our tomatoes. He comes from 40 minutes away and he grows his tomatoes out in the sunshine and they are superb.”
“All our seafood is coming from around this island. Every morning I go to the fish market in town (Agios Nikolaos) and every night they call me — even at one at night — to tell me if there’s anything special which they will buy straight from the boat for me.”
Combining Traditional Cretan Cooking with Global Techniques
“What we do here is combine what happens in a local farmhouse kitchen with modern techniques from around the world,” said Dimos who pointed to one dish I’d enjoyed that lunchtime.
“Your starter was a kind of risotto with a Greek salad inside and raw prawns that have been ‘ceviched’ for ten minutes in lemon juice, pepper and paprika. We cut the prawns in half to marinate them — and we might also add sea urchin.”
It was sensational. The freshness of a Greek salad, the creaminess of a risotto and the raw citric fishiness of prawns and urchin combined to create something that arguably encapsulated eastern Crete in a single mouthful.
The Challenge: Bringing Cretan InspiratiHome
The challenge I’ve given myself is to replicate the dish loosely by using fabulous fresh ingredients from here in the South West. The citrus and the rice wouldn’t be local but I might find alternatives — even so, it should be possible to emulate the idea and create some morsel that sums up Cornwall, say, in one happy bite.
Recipe from Dimos Balopoulos
Smoked Octopus Escabeche with Black Guacamole and Salad of Fermented Cucumber & Turnip
Ingredients:
For the Octopus
600-700 gr octopus
Salt, pepper to taste
1 medium onion
4 bay leaves
Olive oil
½ cup red wine
For the Black Guacamole
2 avocados, peeled and pitted
1 green chilli
½ cup fresh coriander
Salt, pepper to taste
30 ml lime juice
1 tsp squid ink
For the Escabeche
360 ml white balsamic vinegar
120 ml rice vinegar
6 allspice berries
2 tsp smoked paprika
7 garlic cloves, diced
4 white onions, diced
1 chilli
240 ml extra virgin olive oil
Salt
60 gr roasted almonds
Smoked Octopus Method
Preheat the oven to 160°C. Wash the octopus and remove its head. Separate the tentacles, cut them into long strips and place them in paper foil with olive oil, salt, pepper, the onion, bay leaves, and drizzle with red wine. Wrap in ovenproof baking paper and then wrap again with aluminium foil. Place in the oven for one hour. When you remove it from the oven, separate octopus from the juices.
Black Guacamole
In a blender add the avocado first and all the ingredients to make a creamy black sauce.
Escabeche
In a frying pan, heat the olive oil, onions, garlic until they’ve turned transparent. Then transfer to a blender with the rest of the ingredients and blend until it turns into a smooth cream.
Salad
Lightly pickled cucumber cut in julienne style
Lightly pickled turnip, julienne style
Chopped cherry tomatoes
Spoonful of capers
Spoonful of olives
Onion that you have pickled briefly
To Serve
Mix and place the salad on a plate then add the guacamole and either place the octopus which has been combined with the escabeche sauce, or place the octopus with the sauce on top.
