Discovering Traditional Greek Orange Pie - Portokalopita - in Santorini Greece
Sometimes, Mike will send me a photo by text message. Usually, it is a memory that has come up on his phone. Today’s photo was stunning. Stone walls, blue pickets, and stucco buildings painted white and ivory pressed against a cloudless Aegean sky.
Instantly, my heart sailed back in time to the island of Santorini. Our stay on the island was expectedly magical. How could it be anything less in such a laid-back, beautiful setting?
During the day, we walked all over the island, traversing the never-ending winding hills of Fira. We wandered from dome to dome, eating our way through the heat. Honey and ricotta gelato for mid-morning. Lava and coconut gelato for afternoon tea. Dinner was donair and kabab and souvlaki. Nothing was disappointing. Our most memorable meal was a lunch of roast chicken and braised lamb shank enjoyed on the most delightful oceanside patio. Beads of sweat dripped from chilled glasses of white wine. I wanted to linger forever. We ate baklava and kataifi almost every day. Both were delicious, but I avoided sweets for a week when we got home!
Breakfast at our hotel was unremarkable for the most part. Standard tourist fare offered by hotels is meant to get you moving and off-premise so the cleaning staff can work uninterrupted on making up rooms. It did the trick, was included, and whispered a bit of Western normalcy into our whirl-wind adventure. One dish stood out on morning number three. A simple, unassuming orange cake that Mike and I both assumed to be a coffee cake of some variety. It was so much more.
The cake called Portokalopita was dense and moist, spongy with syrup, and fragrantly orange. Actual orange, not the Fanta soda flavour but the fresh-from-the-tree kind of orange that leads you to imagine the cook stuffing her pockets with fruit on her walk to work. In my vision, she lifts each orb from the tree and inhales its delicate scent before picking it for use. I imagine her silently judging the worthiness of every orange. Whatever her criteria, her skill was mastery. Nothing else we ate in Greece stayed with us so memorably.
Portokalopita is the first dish Mike was determined to recreate at home. He scoured the internet for photos that looked most authentic to find a recipe that seemed picked from Yaya’s archive. He hit gold on the first strike. We used a recipe from MyGreekDish.com and have since returned many times for orange cake and other regional specialties. Only the lemon potatoes have disappointed me so far. Realistically, I expect to be forever disappointed in lemon potatoes. It’s one of the few downfalls of travel, to be forever doomed to fake joy over weak renditions of authentic fare for the rest of your life.
Mike’s photo share was a welcome slice of joy in my day. The sights, the smells, the warm Aegean breezes, and punches of sweet flavour flooded back and delivered me straight to Santorini. It was an adventure of a lifetime. And this weekend, I think we’ll break the greyness of winter with a freshly baked Portokalopita to honor the memory.
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