Macedonia & Thrace Recipes
This lemon garlic lamb recipe isn’t you’re usual Greek-style lamb, even though it’s a very traditional, old recipe from northern Greece. It calls for making slits in the exterior of the lamb all over and stuffing them with a pungent mixture of Greek graviera or kefalograviera cheese, a lot of garlic, ground allspice and […]
Chicken with prunes, or Poyo con Prunes as it’s called in Ladino, the language of the Sephardic Jews of Thessaloniki, is one of the most delicious traditional Sephardic recipes. Dried fruits and meat are a common combination in Sephardic and Northern Greek cooking. I paired this chicken recipe with an Agiorghitiko red wine from […]
Huevos Haminados – slow-cooked eggs in onion skins – is one of the most storied Sephardic recipes from Thessaloniki. These eggs are cooked for hours over onion skins and with Greek coffee and a few other ingredients so that they acquire a deep brown color. This is by far one of the great, traditional […]
Eggplant with meatballs in tomato sauce is a luscious, easy recipe that I learned from my friend Hella Matalon, a prominent member of the Jewish community of Thessaloniki. If you can’t find the Florina red pepper, a long, sweet fleshy pepper, you can use any sweet fresh red pepper for this dish.
Walnuts inform much of the Sephardic cooking of Thessaloniki. This meatball with walnut sauce recipe called Keftes de Nogada is surprisingly simple yet a very delicious and satisfying way to serve one of the world’s great comfort foods. It is a classic of Thessaloniki’s Sephardic community.
Bougatsa is arguably the most famous pastry of Thessaloniki. It’s typically a crispy concoction of paper-thin phyllo and a creamy, silky-sweet filling. Bougatsa can also be savory. This recipe is adapted from one of the city’s most famous bougatsa places, Bandis, whose family has been making this classic Greek dessert and wonderful Greek breakfast […]
Here is one of the absolute classic Greek meze recipes from the country’s de facto food capital, Thessaloniki. This recipe is found in many specialty meze restaurants, and it’s often spicy. Peppers are an important raw ingredient in and around Thessaloniki. Many different varieties are cultivated in the region, and they appear like a […]
After visiting a mussel farmer off the coast of Thessaloniki, I fully understood the deliciousness of this otherwise common mollusk. Mussels are amazing! It’s no wonder this classic Northern Greek recipe for mussel pilaf is such an icon of Thessaloniki’s rich food history. And that history, in turn, is the very reason why Greece’s […]
This Greek recipes for Kydonato—after the Greek word for quince, kydoni, is a popular Sunday dish in northern Greece, typically made either with lamb or beef and typically stewed all together. Lamb shoulder or other stewing cuts are the norm. The recipe that follows calls for lamb shank, which facilitates a much more elegant, […]
In some parts of Northern Greece, there are similar Greek recipes for pies made with cornmeal or with greens instead of zucchini. Basically, the idea is to make a thick batter and to bake that in a well-oiled large baking pan. The final pie should be about 2 ½ cm (1-inch) thick.