Learn about feta, other Greek cheeses, olives, olive oil, grains, wines & spirits and more Greek gourmet ingredients as an introduction to all that's healthy, delicious, and unique about Greek foods. This video is an introduction to the Greek gourmet pantry for people who love to cook. Most of these ingredients and food products are available in Greek shops across America and Europe, and at the Hellenic Gourmet Shop at the Athens Venizelos International Airport
E.U. membership ushered in a torrent of new foods, many available for the first time on supermarket shelves. Restaurant menus from the 1990s read like a catalogue of novel ingredients that were embraced more or less indiscriminately. In the early 1990s I reviewed dishes such as spinach-cheese pies in wonton wrappers, potato pancakes with smoked trout and heavy cream, and baked wheels of camembert with berry sauce. There was smoked salmon or salmon roe on what seemed like every other plate of pasta, with the then-requisite vodka-cream sauce.
As the '90s progressed and stocks rose, restaurants reflected new wealth and unabashed hubris. Bouncers became fixtures at the doors, controlling who was allowed in. At one now-defunct restaurant, where my ancient Volkswagen Beetle was the only jalopy in a row of gleaming BMWs, the chef served me fish on a plate garnished with a large rock. Lavishly designed restaurants opened one after another. Mostly, the food was flashy with little substance, a metaphor for what was happening in society. The stock market eventually crashed, and the well-guarded, oversized and over-designed eateries began to close.
When the 2004 Olympics loomed large, chefs began to embrace regional ingredients and to rework forgotten dishes to fit a modern nation. Pride and provenance pervaded the restaurant scene almost to the point of excess, with menus reading like maps of the country's food products. Greek was in.
But the five years after the Olympics marked one of the most corrupt and decadent periods in modern Greek history. Scandal after government scandal soured headlines. Crooked officials cooked the books. The epitome of excess for me came at one of Athens's most fashionable restaurants, when I sampled, with (much justified) hesitation, a heaping mound of freeze-dried feta, numbingly cold, dry as sawdust and about as flavorful. Like the tenuous foundations on which Greeks erected their glorious glitz, so did chefs serve food that was the culinary equivalent of a house of cards: They fashioned foams from the components of skordalia, the unapologetically heady garlic-potato puree; fed us feta in myriad guises, including ice cream; and tumbled cubes of Greek-salad-flavored gel and even sacrosanct moussaka into martini glasses.
To be fair, not all of it was bad, but most of it was intimidating, food that bullied even savvy diners into feeling that they had to like it in order to fit into some new socio-culinary order. The media, meanwhile, waxed poetic about every spritz of foam. No one asked why so much of what had been a robust, earthy cuisine had been deconstructed into hot air, much like what was happening on a larger stage with government coffers..
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cloudburstlenepmhq 1 year ago
I wish you had identified each cheese for us.
2hotinaz 2 years ago