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| Kourabiedes |
When it comes to Christmas in Greece everyone is thinking about delicious sweets with honey and spices or beautiful biscuits covered with powder sugar. In fact there is no Christmas in Greece without this nice smell of the butter and the sirup in our kitchens to bring memories of our childhood Christmas. So the most traditional Holiday sweets in Greece are kourabiedes and melomakarona. The first one is a kind of biscuit with quite intense taste of butter (which is the main ingredient) and is coverded with confectionary sugar that makes it not only tasty but beautiful too and remind us the white Christmas (that very rarely comes in Greece). The second one is a soft sweet with orange , cinnamon and walnuts but the main ingredient is the honey sirup and this makes the difference! Melomakarona are bathed in honey when they're already baked and the honey makes them so soft and delicious! So lets see what's the history behind those sweets.
Our first sweet, kourabies has a long history. Originally comes from the east, Qurabiya (Azerbaijani) or Kurabiye (Turkish), where Kuru means dry and biye = biscuit. The biscuit name was established in the Middle Ages from the Latin bis-cuit which means baked twice, a technique of maintaining the bread of the soldiers and seamen. The ancient Greeks used to call this technique “di-pyron “.
The Latin bis-cuit spread by Venetian merchants in Asia, where it changed in biya / biye, where it connected with “Qura” and gave the new mixed (Latin-oriental) word Qurabiya / Kurabiye. In Greece it is our favourite “kourabie” the dry biscuit filled with almonds and powdered sugar.
The recipe is the following:
700 gr flour
350gr butter
100gr chopped almonds
100gr powdered sugar
1 tablespoon of vanilla extract
Beat the butter and the powdered sugar with an electric mixer until is frothy. Then add the flour, the vanilla extracts and almonds and we and we stir with our hands till all the ingredients mix together smoothly. We give the shape of biscuits using the palm of our hands and we bake at 170o degrees for about 20-25 minutes. When they’re ready we let them cool and then we sprinkle with flower water first and then with powdered sugar till the’re completely covered.
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| Melomakarona |
The second traditional sweet is “Melomakarona”. The word comes from the ancient Greek word makaria” which means ”blessed”, and it used to be a piece of bread, served after the funerals. Later when honey syrop (meli in greek) was added, it was named “melomakarono”, and was used by the Greeks that lived in Minor Asia as a sweet in Christmas and New Years Eve Orthodox Holidays.
The recipe is :
300gr olive oil
200ml sunflower oil
120gr sugar
1kg flour
100ml warm water
70ml cognac
100ml orange juice
Orange Zest
1/2 tablespoon bakers ammonia
1/2 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 tablespoon cinnamon
1/2 tsp cloves
SYRUP
1kg sugar
1/2lt water
300gr honey
We add all the ingredients (except flour) and we dilute the ammonia into the orange juice.We stir well with the fouet till the mixture becomes smooth. Then we add the 900gr of flour and we knead with our hands till the dough becomes soft that doesn’t stick to the hands (if it’s necessary we add some more flour).We make the melomakarona in whatever shape we want and we bake them in 170 degrees for about 25 minutes.
Sirup : In a pot we put the sugar with the water and let them boil.
We turn off the heat and we add the honey. We stir till it melts. We put the cold melomakarona inside the hot sirup for s couple of seconds. We sprinkle the walnuts, cinammon and the clove and we serve. We sprinkle the honey sirup that left on the melomakarona.
George Gkevrekis
source: www.portalgreece.gr
