Voutímata: Cretan sweet biscuits, Athens Market

Voutímata: Cretan sweet biscuits from Athens Market

This past Saturday morning I was overcome with a need for a large amount of fresh spinach and so, without even finishing my coffee, I jumped in the car and headed off to the farmers' market in my old neighbourhood, Printers' Row. As much as I've loved going up to the Saturday morning Green City Market in Lincoln Park, that is a relatively long trek for us Westsiders and in addition, I very much wanted to reconnect with the farmer whose stand we visited just about every week from summer to fall for several years. And on top of that, as I started the car and cranked up the Jacques Brel CD, the thought occurred to me: spinach goes with paximadia goes with Cretan olive oil goes with feta goes with olives... So then, first Printers' Row, then Greektown and my beloved Athens Market, which I discussed at length some time ago here:

Athens Market (link)

After getting my spinach and a few other items at the farmers' market, I headed up and over to Greektown, which I especially like in the quiet of the morning. At the Athens Market, I made my usual circuit through the aisles, getting on this occasion just a few items, including some (as always) fabulously fresh Greek feta and a couple of varieties of olives at the deli counter.

But just before getting to the deli counter, on a shelf in front of the counter that runs along the back wall, next to the paximadia, I saw a new item (or at least one I hadn't come across before in that part of the store), namely small round biscuits coated with sesame seeds packaged in clear plastic bags. Upon further inspection, I found that these were sweet biscuits from that place that produces so many outstanding food products, Crete, made from nothing more than flour, sugar, olive oil, orange juice and sesame seeds. Now, sweets made with olive oil probably present something of an odd pairing of flavours to many folks but for Southern Italians and Southern French and Greeks, this combination makes perfect sense.

So then, I bought the bag, took them home and tried them: they're excellent. Though different in some basic ways, these voutímata (singular voútima) are to me reminiscent of the delicious lemon taralli that we get on a regular basis at Masi's Italian Superior Bakery (link) in that they both feature the citrus fruit flavour and keep the sweetness to a nicely restrained level. Voutímata are flavoured also with cinnamon and various dried fruits and are clearly the sweet analogue to the delicious Cretan rusks used in savoury dishes, paximadia (also available at Athens Market), which resemble very much the Southern Italian freselle (also available at Masi's), though an especially wide-range of grains are still used to make paximadia.

The voutímata me portokali (sweet biscuits with orange) at Athens Market are not exactly cheap at $5.49 a bag but in my estimation they're definitely well worth the price.

I would guess, or at least hope, that there might be a Greek bakery in the area that might make this style of voutímata and I should take a look in Artopolis next time I'm in Greektown. But for a packaged and imported product, the ones from Crete on sale at Athens Market are excellent.

Kalí sas órexi!
Antonius