Greek Vegetarian Food

Greek vegetarian food is the meatless side of the Greek table. Cooking classes and food walks with a host take place in Crete, Athens, Thessaloniki and Santorini. Topics run from Santorini fava and imam bayildi to gemista, lupin seeds and wild greens. Orthodox fasts and xynomizithra cheese also have sections. Related pages cover Greek food, Greek mezedes and Greek cheese. All of these outings sit within a wider choice of Greece tours.

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What is Greek vegetarian food?

Greek vegetarian food covers meatless dishes such as briam, fasolada and gemista. Briam is a mixed vegetable dish, fasolada is a white bean soup, and gemista are stuffed vegetables. Vegetable moussaka and dolmas, or stuffed leaves made without minced meat, belong on the same list.

Classical Greek writers called the diet abstinence from beings with a soul, meaning a refusal to eat animals. As a deliberate way of life, it stayed with a small number of people. They belonged to certain philosophical schools and religious groups. The history of Greek vegetarian food reaches back to the 6th century BCE, in the earliest reliable evidence.

Two early groups went beyond meat. The Orphics followed a religious movement, and the strict Pythagoreans followed the teacher Pythagoras. Both groups refused eggs and stayed away from meat sacrifices to the gods. The philosopher Empedocles became a radical voice for the diet in the 5th century BCE. English speakers once called vegetarians Pythagoreans.

The Mediterranean diet, a modern eating pattern, draws on foods of Greece, Italy and coastal France and Spain. Its plate is heavy with olive oil, vegetables, fresh fruit, whole grains, nuts and legumes. Legumes are the plant family of beans and lentils. Greek vegetarian food shares that base of olive oil and legumes.

• Home cooking: Greek lathera dishes stew leeks, spinach, cauliflower, okra, peas and green beans with olive oil.
• Fasting rule: Orthodox believers in Greece eat no animal products in fasting periods, apart from honey.
• Modern label: American researchers Ancel Keys, a biologist, and Margaret Keys, a chemist, proposed the Mediterranean diet concept in 1975.

An old myth stands behind Greek vegetarian food. Hesiod and Plato recorded a Golden Age at the start of humanity. In that age, hunting, herding and meat-eating were unknown. The earth produced all the food its people needed without any farming.

What does Santorini fava add to Greek vegetarian food?

Greek vegetarian food gains a protected dish from Santorini, called Fava Santorinis. It uses the seeds of Spanish vetchling, a legume in the pea family. Growers raise this vetchling only on Santorini and its neighbouring islands. Protected here means a legal link to that land.

Residents of Santorini and the nearby islands have grown this legume for 3,500 years. Other places know it only as a wild plant. Seeds also turned up in old jars among the ruins of Akrotiri, dated to about 1600 BCE. Akrotiri is an ancient settlement on the island.

Greek vegetarian food here depends on the ground itself. Volcanic ash, a cellular soil full of tiny holes, sea humidity and drought shape this crop. Together they form its ecosystem, the web of living things and surroundings. In good years, island growers reap roughly 800 kilograms from each hectare, a standard land measure.

The seeds carry serious food value. Protein makes up 25% of the seed, a very high share. Dietary fibre makes up 26%, and that is the plant material the body cannot fully digest. As Greek vegetarian food, fava also works in two ways at table. It serves as a dip or as a main course dish.

• Serving: Cooked fava comes to the table with lemon juice, olive oil and chopped onion.
• Status: The European Union gave the plant a Protected Designation of Origin, a label tying food to its region.
• Word: English took the word pea through Latin from the Greek pison, an old name for the plant.

Across Greek vegetarian food, the name fava also covers yellow split peas. Cooks simmer them with onions and spices until they form a creamy purée. A purée is food crushed until smooth, so the dish has the body of a thick spread.

How does imam bayildi fit into Greek vegetarian food?

Greek vegetarian food includes imam bayildi, a Turkish dish whose name means the imam fainted. An imam is a Muslim religious leader. Greek speakers call it imam baildi, a minor variant of the Turkish name. The recipe uses a whole aubergine in olive oil.

The dish starts with a whole aubergine, also called eggplant. Cooks fill it with onion, garlic and tomatoes, then simmer it gently in olive oil. It belongs to the class called zeytinyağlı, a Turkish word for dishes based on olive oil. In Greek vegetarian food as elsewhere, the finished aubergine reaches the table warm or at room temperature.

Legend explains the name. In one telling, an imam collapsed on tasting the version cooked by his wife. A second folk tale gives his bride a dowry, or goods brought to a marriage. That dowry was twelve jars of fine olive oil. She cooked aubergine with tomatoes and onions every evening until the oil ran out.

With no oil left, no dish came on the thirteenth day, and the imam fainted. A third tale gives Greek vegetarian food its own link. It names a Greek cook as the person who prepared the dish for him. During Ottoman times the recipe reached the Pontian minority of Anatolia, now part of Turkey.

• Neighbours: Bulgaria, North Macedonia, southern Romania, Albania and Kosovo all use minor variants of the Turkish name.
• Arabic name: Arabic speakers call the same dish imam bayuldi, a name very close to the Turkish original.
• Meat version: Adding ground meat turns the stuffed aubergine into a different dish, known in Turkish as karniyarik.

Aubergine ranks among the important vegetables of Greek cooking. Tomatoes, potato, green beans, okra, green peppers and onions stand beside it. Greek vegetarian food therefore draws on a common harvest for this dish. The vegetable fills other recipes too.

Which place does spanakorizo hold in Greek vegetarian food?

Greek vegetarian food has a very literal name in spanakorizo, a Greek word meaning spinach rice. Spinach and rice are the two core ingredients. The title of the dish therefore works as a short recipe, and food writers class it as vegetarian.

Cooks treat spanakorizo as a pilaf, which is rice cooked in a seasoned liquid. It carries the description of a typical Greek country dish, served either hot or cold. A standard recipe takes long-grain rice and fresh spinach, with dill, fresh mint and onion. Olive oil, salt and black pepper complete the seasoning.

Greek vegetarian food leans here on a plant from further east. Spinach is native to Central and Western Asia. Its leaves count as a common vegetable whether fresh, cooked or stored. The Arabs brought it to Sicily in 827 CE. Three works from the 10th century hold the earliest Mediterranean records of spinach.

Spinach reached the Iberian Peninsula, modern Spain and Portugal, by the late 12th century. There the writer Ibn al-Awwam gave it a grand title, the chieftain of leafy greens. Botanists class spinach as dioecious, meaning separate plants carry the female and male flowers. In Greek vegetarian food and elsewhere, the leaves taste very different raw and cooked.

• Serving: Feta cheese and lemon commonly appear beside spanakorizo when the dish reaches the table.
• Water: Raw spinach contains 91% water, along with 4% carbohydrates and 3% protein.
• Blanching: Blanching, a quick dip in boiling water, lowers oxalate, a natural compound in spinach leaves.

Greek vegetarian food also has a drink match for spanakorizo. Suggested wines are simple whites and retsina, a Greek wine flavoured with pine resin. Resin is the sticky sap that pine trees release, and the wine takes its taste from it.

How do gemista fill out Greek vegetarian food?

Greek vegetarian food has a stuffed dish in gemista, a Greek name that means filled with. Cooks fill tomatoes and bell peppers with rice or ground beef, or with both, then bake them. The meatless form keeps the rice and drops the beef.

Turkish cooks call meatless dolma yalanci dolma, meaning fake dolma, and the usual filling is seasoned rice. The name reflects an older view of vegetarian dishes as substitutes for the real thing. The word dolma itself has Turkish origins and means something stuffed. Greek vegetarian food keeps the same rice base in gemista.

Stuffed peppers also belong to the wider world of dolma, a Middle Eastern family of stuffed dishes. Dolma come to the table warm or cold, and certain types use whole vegetables such as whole peppers. Greek vegetarian food shares this family with Balkan, Arab, Turkish and Armenian kitchens.

The ancient world knew stuffed dishes under other names, such as the Ancient Greek thrion. Medieval and early modern cooks later placed them in the Ottoman palace kitchen. Stuffed squash shows the split between two forms. The meatless version counts as an olive-oil dish, eaten warm, while the meat version is served hot.

• Pepper type: Bell peppers are botanically berries, yet kitchens use them as a vegetable or side dish.
• Origin: Peppers first grew in Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean islands and the north of South America.
• Arrival: Pepper seeds reached Spain in 1493, then spread through Europe and Asia.

The bell pepper in this Greek vegetarian food comes in a wide range of colours. Its cultivars give red, orange, yellow, green, white and purple fruit. A cultivar is a plant variety kept by growers, and these fruits belong to Capsicum annuum.

Where do chickpeas appear in the story of Greek vegetarian food?

Greek vegetarian food turns the chickpea into revithosoupa, the Greek name for chickpea soup. The soup also goes by revithada. Both names belong to one of the earliest legumes cultivated by farmers. A legume is a plant that carries its seeds in pods.

Farmers first bred the chickpea into a crop about 10,000 years ago. Wheat, barley, peas and lentils were tamed at the same time. By the late Neolithic Era, the final Stone Age phase, the crop grew in what is now Greece. Bronze Age growers then carried chickpeas to Crete, so Greek vegetarian food has old local roots.

The pulse behind this Greek vegetarian food had an ancient Greek name, erebinthos. That word appears in the Iliad, the poem of the Trojan War, around 800 BCE. It later gave rise to the Spanish garbanzo, a name used in American English since 1759. Theophrastus, an ancient Greek plant writer, also discussed the crop around 300 BCE.

His Historia Plantarum describes a chickpea variety called rams. The Latin species name arietinum rests on the same image. The seed resembles the head of a ram. He also recorded that chickpeas differ in size, colour, taste and shape. Selective breeding, the choosing of the best plants for seed, produced those differences.

• Plant: Slim feathery leaves line the stem of a plant that stands 20-50 cm high.
• Flowers: Its white flowers carry fine veins of blue, violet or pink colour.
• Pods: Each seedpod holds two or three peas, and the crop counts as a pulse, a dried edible seed.

Greek vegetarian food sits inside the Mediterranean area where the kabuli type leads. Kabuli is a large tan chickpea with a smooth coat, grown in temperate regions. Chickpeas are also high in protein, a nutrient that builds and repairs body tissue.

Why do lupin seeds belong in Greek vegetarian food?

Greek vegetarian food has a seasonal snack in lupin seeds. They are a very common bite during Lent on Crete and in the Peloponnese. Lent is the Christian fasting period before Easter. The white lupin itself is a pulse grown since ancient times.

Preparation stays simple. The seeds normally soak in seawater first, which softens their flavour, and people then eat them raw. A lupin is a flowering plant of the pea family. This species, the white lupin, is a traditional pulse across the Mediterranean region. Greek vegetarian food treats the seed as a ready snack.

The start of lupin farming has been linked with Ancient Egypt, but ancient Greece is the stronger case. Biodiversity, the range of plant forms, was at its greatest in Greece. Wild-growing forms still survive there today. The Greek name thermos, which roughly means hot, adds to that case for a Greek origin.

From Greece, the plant spread to nearby lands, notably Egypt and Ancient Rome. Forms with white seeds and white or greyish-blue flowers moved west into the Italian peninsula. Greek vegetarian food gains real protein from this crop. The seed holds between 35.0% and 53.7% protein. Oil ranges from 6.2% to 12.0%.

• Plant: White lupin is an annual plant that grows to between 30 and 120 cm tall.
• Soil: The crop tolerates acidic soils and helps restore tired ground, as it has since ancient times.
• Water: A long tap root means the plant needs little water after the start of its growing season.

Greek vegetarian food here uses a plant native to the northeastern Mediterranean. The seed also travels under other names abroad: lupini in Italian and tramousse in French. The Arabic name is termes, and Egyptian street sellers offer it after soaking in salted water.

What role do bamies play in Greek vegetarian food?

Greek vegetarian food cooks okra as bamies, one of the ladera dishes. Ladera literally means oily, the name for vegetables cooked in olive oil. Greek kitchens stew these green pods in tomato sauce with potatoes. The plant itself comes from the mallow family.

Okra pods turn slimy in the pot because they are mucilaginous. That means they hold a thick, gluey substance called mucilage. An acidic food such as tomato is one way to reduce the slime. Tomato sauce is also the Greek base for the pods. Mucilage also contains soluble fibre, a fibre that dissolves in water.

Okra is a flowering plant native to West Africa, and it is related to cotton, cocoa and hibiscus. English speakers in certain countries call it lady’s fingers. Its fruit is a capsule, or dry seed case, up to 18 cm long with a five-sided cross-section. Greek vegetarian food uses those pods.

Arabia passed the plant to the countries on the Mediterranean shores. The word okra comes from a West African language, possibly Igbo, a language of Nigeria. The Latin species name esculentus means edible. Greek vegetarian food relies here on a crop that ranks among the toughest vegetables in heat and drought.

• Harvest: Pods must come off the plant immature, since they quickly turn fibrous and woody.
• Meat tables: Greek cooks also serve okra in tomato sauce beside chicken or lamb on other plates.
• Water: Raw okra is 90% water, with 7% carbohydrates, 2% protein and negligible fat.

Greek vegetarian food uses the pods, yet the whole plant feeds people. Young leaves cook like beet greens, and roasted ground seeds make a caffeine-free coffee substitute. Pressed seeds also give a greenish-yellow edible oil with a pleasant taste.

How do artichokes enrich Greek vegetarian food?

Greek vegetarian food turns artichoke hearts into anginares alla Polita, a hearty stew with potatoes and carrots. The name means artichokes city-style, and the city in question is Constantinople. An artichoke is a kind of thistle, grown as food for its flower buds.

Onion, lemon and dill flavour the stew. People eat the bud of the plant before it blooms. Cooks want the fleshy lower scales and the base, which is called the heart. The mass of unripe florets at the centre, small single flowers, is called the choke. It turns inedible in older, larger flowers.

The artichoke in Greek vegetarian food is a bred form of the wild cardoon. That wild plant is native to the Mediterranean area. Homer and Hesiod name the cardoon as a plant of the garden in the eighth century BC. Scholars have debated whether ancient Greeks and Romans ate the artichoke itself, or whether that form came later.

Growers in Sicily raised varieties of artichoke from ancient Greek classical times. Those Greeks called them kaktos and ate both the leaves and the flower heads. Greek vegetarian food celebrates it too. Tinos and the Peloponnese villages of Iria and Kantia mark local production with an artichoke day or festival.

• Size: This vegetable grows 1.4-2 m tall, with silvery, deeply lobed leaves that arch outwards.
• Season: The peak season for the harvest is spring, with a second peak in mid-autumn.
• Colour: The small individual florets inside the large flower head are purple.

Greek vegetarian food has its own name for it, anginares. English took the word artichoke from northern Italian in the sixteenth century. That Italian term traces back to medieval Andalusi Arabic al-kharshufa, a word built on the meaning of scale.

Which zucchini dishes shape Greek vegetarian food?

Greek vegetarian food stuffs zucchini as kolokithakia gemista, filled with rice and sometimes meat. Cooks finish the dish in the oven or on the stovetop. The zucchini, called courgette in France and Britain, is a summer squash. It is picked while seeds and rind stay soft.

Zucchini descend from squashes first tamed over 7,000 years ago in Central America and Mexico. The zucchini itself came later, when Milan breeders produced it in the late 19th century. The name is the plural of an Italian small form of zucca, meaning gourd or pumpkin. Greek vegetarian food therefore uses a fairly young vegetable.

Botanists call the fruit a pepo, a kind of berry with a hardened rind. Cooks treat it as a vegetable. Growers normally harvest it at about 15-25 cm, though mature fruit can reach 1 metre. Zucchini with the flowers still attached signal a fresh, young fruit. They are prized for a sweeter flavour.

Squash blossoms link Greek vegetarian food to the past. Their soft cheese stuffing recalls the Ancient Greek dish thrion. The flowers have a subtle flavour close to young zucchini, and they can be eaten raw. Growers pick only the male flowers when they want the plant to bear fruit as well.

• Cooking: Cooks steam, boil, grill, stuff, bake, barbecue or fry zucchini, and the skin normally stays on.
• Greek style: The French dish courgettes à la grecque, or Greek style, is served cold after a wine marinade.
• Cyprus: Cypriot cooks also stuff the flowers of the marrow, a mature relative of the zucchini.

Greek vegetarian food suits the delicate flavour of zucchini. The simplest recipes need little more than olive oil and herbs. The vegetable can also go into a cold salad raw, sliced or shredded. It also works lightly cooked in a hot salad.

Which wild greens make up horta in Greek vegetarian food?

Greek vegetarian food serves khorta, literally greens, as a standard side dish, hot or cold. Olive oil and lemon dress the plate. The greens can include asparagus and named plants such as zoxos and styfnos. Horta is a second English spelling of the word.

The horta list names armyrithra, glistrida, styfnos and zoxos, all Greek names for edible greens. Asparagus stands on the same list. Cooked leaf vegetables of this kind go by the name pot herbs. A leaf vegetable is a plant leaf cooked or eaten raw as food, sometimes with tender stalks.

One named green is black nightshade, whose leaves carry the name istifno in Greece and Turkey. On Crete the name is stifno. Those leaves go into the boiled salad of Greek vegetarian food known as horta. Another is Amaranthus blitum, known in Greece as vlita, which cooks boil and serve like a salad.

The name amaranth comes from the Ancient Greek amarantos, meaning unfading. Dioscorides, a Greek medical writer, mentions the plant in his classical works. The name chicory has a Greek root too. The genus name Cichorium goes back to the ancient word kikhora, meaning endive. Greek vegetarian food therefore carries old Greek plant names.

• Pie filling: Greek cooks simmer tender nettle leaves and use them to fill hortopita, a wild greens pie.
• Scale: Botanists know of nearly 1,000 plant species whose leaves people can eat.
• Relative: Spiny chicory, native to the Mediterranean region, is both gathered wild and grown as a leafy green.

Greek vegetarian food also turns greens into hortosoupa, a vegetable soup with a wide range of versions. Leaf vegetables of this sort mainly come from short-lived soft-stemmed plants such as lettuce and spinach. Woody plants supply edible leaves as well.

How do Orthodox fasts shape Greek vegetarian food?

Greek vegetarian food owes a strict side to the Orthodox calendar. Laity in that church traditionally avoid animal products on Wednesdays and Fridays. The same rule covers four major fasting periods. Laity are ordinary church members who are not clergy.

The four periods are the Nativity Fast, Great Lent, the Apostles’ Fast and the Dormition Fast. For strict Greek Orthodox Christians, all Lent meals leave out animal products. Greek vegetarian food then takes over the table, close to vegan, meaning free of every animal food. Unlike veganism, this abstinence is only temporary.

Xerophagy is a strict fasting form whose name joins Greek words for dry and eat. Dry here mainly means food with no oil. Within the Greek tradition, that oil means olive oil. An early church text named bread, salt, water, nuts and vegetables cooked with water and salt. Greek vegetarian food without olive oil fits those days.

The Dormition Fast runs from August 1 to August 14, before the feast on August 15. Dormition means falling asleep, a church word for the death of Mary. It is stricter than the Apostles’ Fast, with wine and oil but no fish on weekends. The Apostles’ Fast ends on June 29.

• Monks and nuns: Orthodox monastics abstain from meat all year, and a large number also avoid dairy and seafood.
• Weekly reason: Tradition links the Wednesday fast to the betrayal by Judas and the Friday fast to the crucifixion.
• Stuffed dishes: Ottoman Christians kept fasts on nearly 180 days a year, and meatless stuffed vegetables became increasingly common.

Greek vegetarian food gives way to a stricter rule on December 24, a fast day called Paramony. The word literally means preparation. Believers able to keep it hold back from food until the first star shows at dusk. A meal with wine and oil then follows.

What does tahini bring to Greek vegetarian food?

Greek vegetarian food spreads tahini, a paste of ground sesame seeds, on bread. It goes on alone or under honey or jam. Greek supermarkets also stock jars ready-mixed with honey or cocoa in their breakfast aisles. The paste therefore also works as a morning food.

The word comes from an Arabic root meaning to grind, and tahini is a butter made of seeds. The common kind uses hulled seeds, with the outer husk removed. Unhulled seeds also work, giving a slightly bitter but more nutritious paste. Roasted seeds are more common than raw ones.

Makers first soak the sesame seeds in water and crush them to part the bran from the kernels. Bran is the outer skin of the seed. A second soak in strong salt water makes the bran sink. Floating kernels are skimmed off, toasted and ground into the oily paste behind this Greek vegetarian food.

Greek vegetarian food also bakes tahini into tahinopita, a sweet roll. It is popular as street food in Cyprus and parts of Greece. The dough holds sugar and oil, rises with yeast, and its texture falls between bread and cookie. Bakers roll it flat, spread it with tahini, sprinkle on sugar, then roll it into a log.

• Comparison: People sometimes compare the tahini roll to the cinnamon roll, another sweet spiced bun.
• Season: In the Cypriot capital Nicosia, street sellers and bakeries offer tahini rolls, which are popular during Lent.
• Name: Cypriot Greek says tashinopita, with a sh sound in place of the mainland h.

Greek vegetarian food gets a rich paste here, at 53% fat, 22% carbohydrates and 17% protein. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote of sesame farming in Mesopotamia, the land of the Tigris and Euphrates. Its main use there was as a source of oil.

How does fasolada feed Greek vegetarian food?

Greek vegetarian food simmers dry white beans into fasolada, a Greek and Cypriot soup with olive oil. Onion, carrots, celery, parsley, thyme and bay leaf join tomatoes in the pot. A single dish therefore brings together a wide spread of garden plants.

Recipes vary widely, and a large number add meat, so Greek vegetarian food follows the meatless pot. Lima beans sometimes replace the white beans, and they are large, flat and pale. Simmering means cooking gently just below the boil. Green beans get similar treatment in fasolakia, a ladera dish simmered in olive oil.

The modern recipe rests on New World plants, because white beans and tomatoes both came from the Americas. Greek cuisine still traces fasolada back to ancient Greece. Ancient Greeks used the word phaselos for beans of Asian origin, the beans grown in Europe then. Those older beans are unrelated to the New World group.

The common bean leads world bean consumption and is native to the Americas. Farmers domesticated it in the southern Andes, Mexico and Central America about 8000 years ago. It grows as a green-leaved vine or an upright bush, and each pod holds 4-8 beans. Greek vegetarian food uses the dried seed inside those pods.

• Turkish cousin: A similar dish in Turkish cooking goes by the name kuru fasulye, meaning dried beans.
• Arabic cousin: The Arabic version, fasoulia, is found from Egypt and Iraq to Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.
• European cousins: Its counterparts in Europe include Italian fagiolata, Spanish fabada and Portuguese feijoada.

Greek vegetarian food takes only part of this plant, which gives more than the dried bean. The unripe green pods are also used for food, and the leaf sometimes serves as a vegetable. The dry straw feeds farm animals as fodder.

What makes lentils a steady part of Greek vegetarian food?

Greek vegetarian food knows lentil soup as fakes, a dish with roots in ancient Greece. The lentil is an annual legume, a plant that lives one year and bears seeds in pods. Its edible lens-shaped seeds are known as pulses.

The English word lentil comes from the Latin lens. Optical lenses share that source because their shape resembles the seed. The plant stands about 40 cm tall. Its pods normally hold two seeds each. Seeds are mainly cooked in stews or soups worldwide, the form Greek vegetarian food follows in fakes.

The crop behind this Greek vegetarian food keeps its first seed leaves underground when it germinates. That habit is called hypogeal. The plant is therefore less exposed to insect attack, wind erosion or frost. Lentils also pollinate themselves, and flowering starts at the lowest buds and moves upward. The bushy plant has a slender, angular stem and hairy branches.

Seed coats divide broadly into grey, tan, green, brown, black or clear. Grey, tan and green coats slowly turn brown with age. Inside, the common shades are orange-red and pale yellow. Green and brown lentils rarely keep their shape in the pot, so soups and stews suit them. Red lentils tend to be smaller.

• Cooking: People eat lentils soaked, sprouted, fried or baked, and boiling remains the leading method.
• Pairing: Cooks frequently combine lentils with rice, because the two share a similar cooking time.
• Salads: Western countries also serve cooked lentils in salads, beside their use in soups.

Greek vegetarian food shares lentil soup with a wide area. The dish also appears across Europe and North and South America. Cooks elsewhere sometimes add chicken or pork, while the meatless pot keeps to the plain pulse alone.

Where does xynomizithra fit in Greek vegetarian food?

Greek vegetarian food gets a sour cheese from xynomizithra, a whey cheese with added milk. Crete is the main home, though other Greek areas make it. Whey is the liquid left after cheesemaking. The cheese is a sour variant of mizithra, from sheep or goat milk.

Whey cheese starts after the curds of ordinary cheese are separated out. At that stage about 50% of the milk solids remain in the whey. Milk solids are the nourishing part of milk other than water. Makers of xynomizithra stir in a little full-cream milk, with a limit of 15% for the Cretan version.

Greek vegetarian food treats the result as a table cheese. It is soft, moist, creamy and snow-white, with a sour taste. It also goes into salads and baked goods. Small cheese pies called kalitsounia are a notable use of it. European Union labels place protected whey cheeses in a separate class from ordinary cheeses.

The Cretan form, Xynomyzithra Kritis, holds protected designation of origin status across the EU and the UK. That label links a food to one named area and method. Mizithra itself is an albumin cheese, made by setting the albumin protein of the whey with heat. Greek vegetarian food therefore holds more than one kind of whey cheese.

• Galotyri: This soft, creamy protected cheese comes from the regions of Epirus and Thessaly.
• Anevato: This protected cheese from mixed sheep and goat milk is spreadable and creamy.
• Pichtogalo Chanion: This white table cheese belongs to the Chania Regional Unit, an area of Crete.

Greek vegetarian food on Crete also has xygalo siteias, a soft cheese from the island’s far east. Its protected status dates from 2008. Whey cheese in general uses the milk solids left in the whey, which are otherwise thrown away.

What do travellers ask about Greek vegetarian food, and what are the answers?

A Greek vegetarian food menu raises four name questions. Briam is a mixed vegetable dish, and hummus has Cypriot links. Tomatokeftedes are tomato fritters from Santorini, and soufiko is a vegetable stew from Ikaria. Each name belongs to Greek or Cypriot cooking.

Before ordering Greek vegetarian food, what is briam?

Briam, also known as tourlou, is one of the ladera dishes, the group cooked in olive oil. The standard mix holds aubergine, zucchini, onions, potatoes, tomatoes, garlic and parsley. Tourlou is the second Greek name for the same plate, so menus can carry either word. Each one points to this vegetable mix.

Is hummus really part of Greek vegetarian food?

Hummus belongs to the local cuisine of Cyprus, in Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot communities alike. In the United Kingdom, Greek Cypriot caterers made it popular. That history sometimes leads people to see it as Greek food. Hummus itself is a Levantine dip of cooked, mashed chickpeas, from the eastern Mediterranean.

Which fritters count as Greek vegetarian food?

Tomatokeftedes are tomato fritters well known across the island of Santorini. A fritter is a small fried cake of batter. Kolokithokeftedes are pumpkin fritters, a second fritter from the same Greek list. Elsewhere, cooks shape shredded zucchini, carrots, cheese, garlic, egg and flour into patties fried in oil.

Does Greek vegetarian food have a vegetable stew from Ikaria?

Soufiko is a vegetable stew from the island of Ikaria. Cooks make it by slow cooking bell peppers, squash, aubergines and tomatoes. Olive oil and herbs complete the pot. Slow cooking means gentle heat over a long time, so the vegetables soften together. Ikaria lies in the eastern Aegean Sea.