When you think pasta, your mind ventures to Rome. When you think rice, your mind ventures to China but like all good things, I can bet you that pasta and rice were invented by a Greek.
Pasta and rice are deeply embedded in the Greek diet. A way to thicken soups, accompany a rich kokkinisto or to stuff vegetables, these carbohydrates are an essential ingredient in Greek cuisine. And with a plethora of choices available, the Greek diet allows you to customise your meal with whatever size, shape, taste and flavour you want.
Rice became popular in Greece during the period of the Ottoman Turk rule, which would explain why most rice dishes have a Middle Eastern slant. The flavours of a Greek pilaff lend themselves comfortably to fragrant and mystical Turkish flavours.
The Greek diet uses both short and long grain rice, interspersing both regularly, and uses rice for savoury and sweet dishes. Rice is the carbohydrate used to consume leftover foods or is used with seasonal foods from your garden. Exactly which vegetable is stuffed to make yemista depends entirely on what time of the year it is.
Rice is also used to thicken soups, like in the famous avgolemono soup (chicken and lemon soup), and can be used to thicken casseroles. A handful of rice thrown into the pot can add extra texture to a main meal. A pilaff made up of seafood almost becomes a Greek version of a paella.
Rice’s most common use in Greek cuisine is to stuff vegetables. Yemista literally translates to ‘stuffed things’, and Greeks literally stuff any vegetable. It’s a great way to consume leftover tomatoes, zucchinis, capsicums and eggplants.
To prepare rice this way, it is first cooked in a pan with lots of olive oil, garlic and onion and whatever herbs you want to use – dill works well – and cooked until it becomes translucent. – think risotto and you will get the texture spot on.
Dolmathes are quite a popular meze. Brined vine leaves are rolled with rice and, in some instances, minced meat of either pork or beef is also included. Rice can also be found in the fillings of pites such asspanakopita, prasopita and lahanopita. It is also used as a side dish to a large Greek meal and is likely to be mixed in with spinach or cabbage.
Rice is a main player in the dessert arena too. A well-known dessert in Greece is rizogalo (rice pudding) – which is also the featured recipe below. It’s a hearty creamy dessert that uses milk, sugar and rice and when boiled and cooled, with a sprinkle of cinnamon on top, you have a gorgeous simple dessert. In some cases rice is used to thicken a sweet pita.
Pasta-making goes back to Ancient Greece and the Italians have to take some credit here, as it was the early Venetians who introduced several kinds of pasta to the Ionian and Dodecanese islands. That’s why pasta is eaten with almost every meal on the Ionian islands.
The Greek diet tends to include pasta dishes more in the winter as a hearty meal and, although spaghetti is supposed to be al dente, I bet when there is a makaronatha in front of you it’s going to be squishy and overcooked. And in some cases, fried in butter.
Pasta itself comes in all shapes and sizes in Greece and each one has its specific function.
Hilopites, an egg and wheat pasta that comes in small even squares, is used mostly in casseroles and is the perfect partner to kokkora kokkinisto. Whereas the thick hollow spaghetti, the one that causes the weird sucking noises, is the bed of choice for the mince meat and bechamel concoction of a pastitsio.
Trahana, the tiny pasta made with buttermilk, is used most often as a soup in itself. You can buy this either sweet or sour and it is often fried up with some onions in paprika and mix that in with crumbled feta on top. This might have been known as a peasant’s dish, but when you taste it you know they had the right idea.
Kritharaki is a pasta that often gets mistaken for rice because of its shape. It’s used predominately in stews and baked dishes that gets cooked in sauces. If you chose to use kritharaki, make sure you lather some grated myzithra on top, and right there is the heart of Greece on a plate.