#koulouri

I’m deranged. I didn’t bake a single thing when it was cool enough to justify turning the oven on, but give me 100+ days and I’m baking everything, all of it for offerings. I lost my desire to bake anything for a long time after I left the restaurant industry but I’m in the mood to delight my cadre of deities with unexpected little joyful things and it’s making me happy. And a little manic too?

This is koulouri; sesame covered rings of dough, baked until crispy on the outside and soft on the inside. Greeks claim them as their own but they’re probably of Turkish origin. Whoever first baked them cheers because they are delicious. If they look a little boring, they aren’t and I ate them all over Greece for breakfast with jam or honey or just plain. A stack of these will be on my Noumenia altar tonight but I’ll eat as many as I can. Sorry Selene, I am a bread whore.

Here’s the recipe (which I snagged on Pinterest and adapted a little for a chewier ring):

500 g AP or bread flour

2 tsp salt

3 tbsp olive oil plus a little to oil bowl

300g lukewarm water (I needed a little more)

2 tsp honey

8g yeast

2 tsp rose water (it didn’t make much difference but vanilla would be nice. Ouzo is in some recipes)

1 1/2 cup raw white sesame seeds

Medium bowl of cool water to dip rings into

Add water, yeast and honey to your mixing bowl. Let bloom 5 minutes, give it a quick stir and add flour and salt.

Mix on medium low speed for about 10 minutes to develop gluten. Dough should be soft but smooth and pliant.

Let rise 30 minutes or until doubled. Cut into 12 pieces (I only got 9 but I wanted big rings) and roll each piece into an 8-9 inch snake. Dip the ends into water to seal, pressing a little if needed. Let rest 5 minutes.

Athens

Athens

A Greek engineer made the first known attempt to send a koulouri, the famous Thessaloniki round bread, into space.

Thanasis Foukis attached the koulouri to a hydrogen balloon and released it from the town of Ptolemaida in northern Greece.

The mission was for the balloon and the attached koulouri to reach the stratosphere.

“Koulouri began experimenting and swiftly realized that the secret behind quality bread-making is in the flour – “and the yeast”, she added while carrying on to passionately analyze that “magic moment when water and flour make something so basic, essential, primordial and vital.”

A new world suddenly opened up for Koulouri. She relies on three sources for organic flour supply – Trinity Farm in Farsala, located in the fertile planes of Thessalia, central Greece; the Kiziridis brothers in Kilkis, northern Greece; and Papageorgiou in Bourazani, northwest Greece. All the flours she uses are ground at stone mills so that the grains are not broken. Besides the flour, she uses honey from Sifnos, fleur de sel from Kythira, the island just off the southeastern tip of the Peloponnese, and olive oil from Trifylia, southwest Peloponnese.    

If you’ve ever found yourself walking the streets of Athens on an early morning, then you might have happened upon a vendor selling the famous Greek koulouria Thessalonikis otherwise known as simitia. These small, sesame-crusted bread rings are sold on street corners and bakeries and are the breakfast of choice among the busy Athenians who hurry on their way to work with nothing more than a…