2009 | No. 82

Paximadia
Cretan Twice-Baked Bread

 

By Diana Farr Louis

My love affair with paximadia did not begin until I had lived in Greece for 25 years. In all that time I had never encountered the thick, rock-hard, twice-baked hunk of whole-grain bread that goes by that name. Then in 1997, when I started to visit Crete to find recipes and stories for a book, I discovered ingredients and dishes unknown on the mainland: fresh white cheeses, dozens of greens, raisin-stuffed sweets, ravioli-sized savory pies, “sour” trahana (a kind of crumbly pasta), snails with rosemary, fish with spiny artichokes. I tasted wedding pilaf made with the broth of 17 chickens or several yearling lambs, and, at last, paximadia, in an astonishing range of shapes and flavors.

My first paximadi (that’s the singular) appeared on a Heraklio menu under the name dakos, and the waiter described it as a kind of dog biscuit. Dakos, or takos, comes from a word meaning “shim,” that piece of wood wedged under a table to stop it wobbling. This undoubtedly is a play on the texture of paximadia, which might just as well have been dubbed petra, or stone. Shaped like a saucer and as big, it was barely visible under a mound of chopped tomato and myzithra cheese (similar to ricotta but with a tang), sprinkled with olive oil and oregano. The paximadi, or rusk, saturated with tomato juice and oil, had softened but was still crunchy, and its nutty flavor added a new dimension to the acidic tomatoes, creamy cheese, and fruity oil. I savored every mouthful.

I was hooked — and I wasn’t the only one. The dish shows up now as an appetizer or salad on menus around the country, where feta often substitutes for the less common soured or fresh myzithra. More surprising is the passion for paximadia evident in Athenian food shops. Where they used to be relegated to untidy heaps in the back of the bakery, now they attract instant attention in displays out front. Whole corridors of supermarkets are devoted to them. A poor people’s staple since antiquity, recommended by Hippocrates, paximadia have seen an astonishing revival.

Rusks first appear in ancient texts as dipyros or dipyritos artos (that’s the way Hippocrates and Aristotle referred to them), literally twice-fired bread or dough that was baked, sliced, and then returned to the warm oven to dry out completely. They acquired the name paximadia as early as the second century in homage to a certain Paxamus, a Greek citizen of Rome and the author of books on subjects as disparate as cookery, farming, dyeing, and sexual positions. In Latin, however, they were panis biscoctus, the ancestor of the Italian biscotto and the Anglo-French biscuit (nowadays likely to be sweet).

Over the centuries, paximadia have been a mainstay for certain groups. Easy to transport, impervious to mold, they were prized by Byzantine armies, sailors on Venetian merchant vessels, shepherds summering in mountain pastures, Kalymnos sponge fishermen, and Aegean pirates. Orthodox monks and nuns, viewing fresh white bread as indulgence, chose paximadia out of piety. Many more people ate them simply because they were poor.

A meal without bread has always been inconceivable to a Greek. While in cities bakers supplied fresh bread daily even to the less well-off, in the countryside few families could afford to bake often. Wood, the fuel for both cooking and baking, was a precious resource. Heating the oven took so much wood and baking was so time-consuming that poor households would bake enough loaves to last a month, eating a few of them fresh and turning the rest into paximadia.

In Crete 12 years ago, I met an extended family in the eastern village of Zakros on their baking day. Although electricity came to rural Crete in the mid-60s, and the village had more than one commercial bakery, the family still preferred to bake its own bread. Alexandra and Irini (in-laws in their sixties) had kneaded 30 kilos of flour with a sourdough starter to make 40 large loaves. When the loaves — scored before baking into five or six hefty slices — came out of the outdoor oven, they were placed on wooden planks. And when they were barely cool enough to handle, Irini squatted down and tore them apart with calloused hands. Saving three loaves for lunch and dinner, Yannis, Irini’s husband, slid the rest back into the oven to dry over the next 24 hours. When I asked why they went to all that trouble, they shrugged and said it was a habit, they enjoyed the company, and knew the ingredients were pure.

The taste of Cretan paximadia must have improved considerably since the 19th century, when travelers complained bitterly about the petrified black rusks they had to endure. The painter and nonsense rhymer Edward Lear, who spent several years in Crete, called them “uneatable biscuit knobs.” That was probably because of the islanders’ preference for barley over wheat. Once the most common grain throughout the eastern Mediterranean, barley declined in cultivation as Rome expanded. The Romans so reviled it that they reserved barley bread and gruel as punishment for their prisoners. Yet barley remained a common grain among the rural poor in Europe, even after urban populations became devoted to white wheat bread. Defying the trend toward wheat, barley persisted in Crete, where the climate and mountainous terrain were unfavorable to wheat. Wheat, being easier to grow almost everywhere else and easier to handle, is justly the world’s leading grain for bread. Barley dough contains far less gluten, so it is less elastic and more difficult to leaven. On its own barley can be too dark and dense for modern tastes, but judiciously combined with the right amount of wheat flour, barley paximadia can be even more delicious than pure wheat versions. Pale brown in color, they have an enticing earthy aroma, a nutty flavor, a satisfying crunch, and a rustic, bran-flecked texture. Although barley is no longer grown on Crete, the taste for it is deeply rooted and seems once again to be gaining. As well as Crete, other Aegean islands, notably Limnos and Kythera, export rusks to the mainland, and just about every neighborhood baker in the country makes his own, but the consensus is that Cretan paximadia are best.

To Manna is one of the biggest and most popular Cretan brands. Nikos Tsatsaronakis, the founder, is a roly-poly man with curly white hair. He has the pink cheeks of someone who looks into ovens several times a day, and when I met him at his plant, his brown shoes were dusted with flour.

Tsatsaronakis’s father was a policeman who harbored a secret desire to be a baker. After he retired in 1948, he invested in a small oven next to his home in Platanos, a nondescript village midway along the west coast of Crete. Tsatsaronakis remembers standing on a stool to reach the kneading trough; young as he was, he helped. “We baked bread only twice a week, 10 kilos of flour at a time, because in those days most people made their own.”

Now his factory employs 80 people, who work three shifts, six days a week, crowded into 4,800 square meters in two buildings. They turn out 15 tons of ­paximadia per day. It took years of dedication to get to this point. “I was only 15 when I got my first break,” Tsatsaronakis told me. “A hunter passed by the bakery and I gave him, in the usual Cretan way, a glass of water to quench his thirst and then a shot of tsikoukia — raki — and a paximadi. He asked how things were going and then offered to sell our paximadia at his grocer’s shop in the central market of Chania.” That’s Crete’s second largest city, on the north coast about an hour’s drive away. “He liked my enthusiasm and zest for work and never stocked anyone else’s products.”

By the time he finished his military service in 1960, Tsatsaronakis was ready to take his paximadia beyond the island. “No one knew what they were outside Crete. But I filled several big gunny sacks with them and sailed to Piraeus to try my luck. I managed to find a few fellow
Cretans who ran kafeneia near Omonia Square, and they’d buy a couple of bags at 12 drachmas a kilo to serve with their ouzo and olives, in the days when there were 30 drachmas to the dollar,” he explained. “The Athenians were harder to persuade — one fellow offered me eight drachmas and said they were only fit for pigs. In a good month, I managed to sell 100 kilos.

“But I believed I could create a market for paximadia. For many years we survived on bank loans, which I always managed to pay back. My father checked on me but let me try anything. For four years, I was the only one selling paximadia in Athens, and then in the 70s I made a deal with a large supermarket chain. By the 80s, I was exporting To Manna to the US. And when the Cretan Diet started making headlines there in the 90s, I couldn’t produce enough paximadia.”

Initially, all were wheat. “After the war, we were sick of barley,” he said. “We craved white bread, white rusks, and biscuits, all made with Manitoba flour sent by the Americans as aid. Funnily enough, we switched because my wife got sick, had problems with her large intestine. The doctor in Athens recommended bread with bran. I started making old-fashioned barley rusks again and she has been well ever since.”

To Manna barley rusks are 80 percent barley. “Anyone can make paximadia that are only 10 percent,” Tsatsaronakis said. He keeps his recipe secret, but essentially it calls for whole-wheat and whole-barley flour, yeast and/or sourdough starter, salt, water, and no preservatives. The grain, 90 percent of it imported from France, Germany, Russia, Ukraine, and Canada, is stone-ground to order in Crete and delivered to huge tanks connected to the kneading troughs, where the flours are mixed in various proportions depending on the type of rusk. The water is specially filtered and treated with ultraviolet radiation to destroy any bacteria, and it is constantly monitored for salts and minerals, which Tsatsaronakis believes affect the rising capacity of the yeast.

Barley rusks demand a wood-fired oven, according to Tsatsaronakis, and one of the two buildings at Platanos is dedicated solely to them. The wood is burned in a 50-year-old brick-lined oven. The embers are raked out, and the intense heat they leave on the oven floor helps the loaves rise higher and more evenly. The process starts around 9 p.m., when the flour is kneaded into dough, formed into broad loaves or bagel-sized rings, and left to rise. Workers partially cut the loaves into thick slices with a small square spatula and then bake them at 240 to 245 degrees C (almost 475 degrees F) for about one hour. When they are cool enough to handle, another team breaks off the slices and lays them in large pans, which are loaded into an enormous oven capable of drying five tons of paximadia at once. There the slices remain at 220 to 225 degrees C (about 425 to 435 degrees F) for up to four hours, depending on size and type, until about 8 a.m. Then they are wheeled to a large, isolated chamber for 24 hours where they cool to room temperature.

Although mixing and kneading are automated, Tsatsaronakis insists that paximadia must be broken by hand, the traditional way. “If you slice them with a knife,” he says, “the surface is uniformly flat and seals in the moisture. Hand-broken rusks are rough and uneven, so the moisture escapes and there is no danger of mold forming. Also, they taste better.” The scientific merit of his reasoning is debatable, and maybe he just likes to do it because it has always been done that way.

The aroma wafting from the barley oven that morning seemed richer and fuller than the usual baking bread, but that could have been because I was hungry. Tsatsaronakis handed me a rusk, but I had to be content with the fragrance. Both the bricklike slab and the round rusk (called kouloura, or ring, similar to Puglia’s frisella) must be soaked in a little water before eating — or you risk a trip to the dentist. Unlike wheat, barley paximadia do not turn mushy when wet; they hold their shape. However, the smaller rusks in greater demand today, while still flecked with bran, are less dense and are delectable straight from the packet. Special kneading (a trade secret Tsatsaronakis won’t reveal) and faster drying leave them lighter and crunchier.

I was too late to see the kneading and baking, but Costas Spiliotis, Tsatsaronakis’s son-in-law and To Manna’s marketing director, took my husband and me on a serpentine tour. We peered into ovens, opened the door of a vast furnace packed with revolving stacks of rusks, and watched white-clad men and women perform the repetitive breaking, weighing, and packing. All were immigrants — Ukrainians, Romanians, Afghans — doing jobs that no Cretans would stoop to in this age of tourism, when so many have gotten rich selling beachfront land for the construction of hotels and resorts.

In true Cretan fashion, after the tour Spiliotis took us next door to the Tsatsaronakis home, where we were expected for lunch. A long table had been set at the side of a lush courtyard shaded by pomegranate and palm trees. Bunches of drying herbs, braids of garlic, and strings of red peppers hung above baskets overflowing with plump tomatoes, lemons, and oranges from the family garden. Everything, even the meat, had been grown organically or raised nearby. In addition to fruit and vegetables, the clan produces its own oil and wine, while the local sheep and poultry feed off the land.

We feasted on turkey breast with mustard sauce, lamb in tomato sauce, string beans with and without tomato sauce, cheeses, a mixed green salad with pomegranate and sunflower seeds, and we tried not to help ourselves too often from the basket of fresh bread and rusks.

After lunch, Marika Tsatsaronakis told me how she likes to serve her husband’s paximadia. “First you have to soak the rusks properly. Dunk them one by one in water for seven seconds and then place them on a moist dish towel for one or two minutes. The easiest thing is to then sprinkle them with olive oil, lemon juice, sea salt, and oregano. But you can also soften them for half an hour with the juice of grated tomatoes instead. They look very appetizing topped with feta or myzithra cheese, and sprinkled with oil and oregano, and surrounded by lettuce leaves, stamnagathi, and olives.” Stamnagathi is a sharp Cretan green you might replace with arugula. “I like to serve smaller rusks with cream cheese, slices of smoked salmon, lemon juice, and capers,” Marika said. “Finally, here’s a suggestion for breakfast or dessert: Take half a round rusk, crack it with your hand against the plate, and serve it with thick, strained yogurt, walnuts, and Cretan thyme-scented honey.”

Even though by then I was munching on Marika’s home-dried figs and almonds, I started thinking of other ways to use paximadia: broken up and thrown into a Greek peasant salad (where they would soften in the dressing), topped with cheese, olive paste, taramosalata, or just about any dip — only the largest dakos and kouloures need presoaking. Bite-sized versions of paximadia called “boukies” make perfect croûtons for soup.

At 4 p.m., we dragged ourselves away from Platanos and the Tsatsaronakis’s hospitality. It had been what the Greeks call “an Armenian visit,” with far more hours spent enjoying ourselves than actually “working,” and that too is typically Greek.

To Manna may be the most visible brand in Athens, but dozens more exist in other parts of Crete, including the excellent Tsiknakis organic paximadia from Messara, south of Heraklio, and Siteiakos Fournos from Siteia in the northeast. The district perhaps best known for its paximadia is Sfakia, in the once-remote area south of Chania. Sfakiana paximadia are of such repute that the Paris baker Eric Kayser, who has opened a few branches in Athens, recently set aside a special corner for them in his shops — unlikely companions for his baguettes, brioches, and fougasses.

Sfakia in the White Mountains was considered the wildest and most rebellious province of the Ottoman Empire, and it remains one of the poorest in present-day Greece, the ground so stony that even thorn bushes struggle to survive. In the center of this hostile rockscape lies the astonishingly flat, green and yellow plateau at Askyfou, which supports a tiny, spread-out village with a couple of tavernas and three bakers. In summer, they host fleets of buses taking hikers back to Chania after they’ve trekked the Samaria Gorge. The only souvenirs on offer are paximadia.

The first bakery we came to was a stone building with a wooden pergola, looking spick and span but very empty. A handsome, muscular man was fishing for bread with a long-handled peel in a large brick oven. Like almost every Sfakian man I’ve ever seen, he was dressed completely in black, although he had exchanged the typical long-sleeved shirt for a black singlet. He had the quintessential features of the district — black hair, black beard, aquiline nose, and startling blue eyes. He was Yannis Kapridakis, and he motioned for us to sit down and told us his story in the lilting mountain accent.

Like many Sfakian men, he comes from a long line of shepherds, and until three years ago he was a shepherd himself. But he couldn’t feed his growing family. “I always loved bread-making,” he said. “Eiha meraki, I had a burning desire, so I went to Athens, took some seminars, and got a government subsidy for the equipment.” Then he gathered recipes from old ladies in the village as well as from his mother, Stavroula, who now helps him out. “I have a passion for anything traditional,” he confessed.

As we talked, he opened bags of seed-encrusted breadsticks, biscuits made with red wine, and of course barley rusks. Baked in an oven stoked with olive wood, they were all delicious, with an ethereal crunch. Kapridakis’s barley comes from Serres in northern Greece, the only place in the country where the grain is still grown. He uses sourdough starter saved from the day before, resorting to a little yeast only on the coldest winter days. His rusks, which contain no preservatives, will last up to ten months. Although he makes up to 500 kilos of dough a day in summer, his range of 20 products is sold only in Chania and Athens. We loaded up the car with an assortment, wished him luck, and drove on to the south coast.

Sfakianos Fournos stands at the entrance to Anopoli, home to about 200 people whose scattered dwellings are wedged between boulders and prickly pears. This hamlet is linked with Hora Sfakion, the “metropolitan” port below, by the wide loops of a sleek new asphalt road. (There, at Nikos Taverna, at the entrance to town on the waterfront, we ate good, honest home cooking, including paximadia from Sfakianos Fournos.) Yorgos Orfanoudakis founded the bakery in 1992. Now 40, he runs it with his wife, Nektaria, and his brother Yannis.

“We started when people stopped baking and the delivery truck stopped bringing bread up from Hora Sfakion. Then we discovered that we liked doing it,” said Yorgos. The island has an enormous catalogue of festive breads. As Yannis filled our glasses with raki, Yorgos brought out a wedding paximadia. Unlike all the other rusks we’d been sampling, these were small and sweet, like Italian biscotti. Made of wheat, they were flavored with olive oil, a little sugar, coriander, and aniseed and rolled in sesame. Originally served only at weddings, they are now made and eaten all year round as accompaniments to tea or coffee. The Orfanoudakises follow their grandmother’s recipe.

Sweet paximadia represent an altogether different direction, and in fact are called paximadakia, “little rusks,” to distinguish between the two. They rarely contain butter, milk, or eggs, and may belong to the Orthodox fasting tradition. They are made with olive oil, orange and/or lemon juice, and wine, raki, or brandy, depending on what you have in the cupboard. The spices can include cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and mastic, and more interest and varied texture can come from raisins, currants, nuts, sesame seeds, and citrus peel.

In every form, paximadia seem to fulfill our desire for a food that tastes wonderful on its own, marries well with other flavors (after all, it’s bread), keeps forever, and is easy to use and inexpensive. Other countries have caught on: paximadia are exported to at least 15 of them, including much of the EU, Finland, Canada, South Africa, and Australia, with the US gobbling the lion’s share.

But, it seems, to no other place is this preserved bread more fundamental than Crete. There, when a youngster loses a baby tooth, she doesn’t stick it under her pillow and wait for a reward from the tooth fairy. Instead, she pokes it into a hole in a stone wall and repeats this wish: “Here, mouse, take my tooth and give me back an iron one so I can chew up our paximadia.” ●

From issue 82