THE FULL Greek

Keith Austin finds a Greek food adventure that will push your stomach to its limits.

It’s the first stop on our seven-night Idyllic Aegean cruise and we’re only about five minutes from the ship, heading for a wine tasting in the hills above Thessaloniki, Greece’s second city, when the guide stops the bus and insists we all get out.

It seems we’re going past a patisserie that sells a famous local delicacy and it would be sacrilege not to stop and try it. It’s 10am, we’ve not long had breakfast but this is Greece, where food is never very far from the locals’ mouths.

The snack in question is trigona panoramatos – a concoction of filo-pastry cones dipped in sugar-syrup and filled with a secret-ingredient custard cream. They are, says our guide, a typical present that people take home to other parts of Greece when they visit.

They are little parcels of crispy, creamy, sweet-toothed heaven that were originally created in the suburb of Panorama and we continue our journey with sticky hands and happy bellies.

At the Gerovassiliou vineyard, we sample wines made from the malagousia grape, described by a staff member as “Greek summer in a bottle”, and others using the fresh, crispness of assyrtiko, an increasingly popular variety that has its origins in the volcanic soil and hot, dry climate of Santorini.

After the wine tasting, we have lunch at Mamalouka, a popular restaurant that serves a starter of home-made Sfakian pie. Known more as a Cretan dish, Mamalouka’s version (it’s less a pie and more of a flat pita) is filled with soft and creamy xynomyzithra cheese and drizzled with honey from Mt Athos. There is Greek salad, naturally, and a large plate of meat as a main course, but the sticky, drippy, cheesy delight of the Sfakian pie is the standout.

The next day, we find ourselves on a Food on Foot tour of Heraklion, Crete’s capital. Our guide, Christina Emm, is a local, with her finger firmly in the Cretan food pie and she starts us off at Zimoto, a cafe, sourdough bakery and croissanterie not far from the town’s famous lion fountain square.

Here, we sip a calming tea made from local herbs, and stuff our faces with, you guessed it, yet more remarkably indulgent Sfakian pie (also known as Sfakianopita) and platefuls of bougatsa, a traditional breakfast fare made of filo pastry filled with semolina cream.

There is a bit of walking after this, which is just as well, before we pop into a biodynamic herb store, taste olive oils and local honeys infused with fir, oak, heather and pine, poke around the fresh vegetable and fish market, and buy a trio of local cheeses that we take to what, for me, is the highlight of the tour, a 99-year-old green-painted kafeneio called Sarandauga.

The place is minuscule so we sit at the outside tables and watch the world bustle by in the narrow market street while sipping cold raki and ploughing our way through a mezze-style selection of plates that include boiled eggs, olives, several dips, slices of sausage, tomatoes, cucumber, a braised lamb dish and our own cheeses. It’s a cool place and I’d like to linger but we have to get a wriggle on because … lunch awaits.

Yes, there is lunch booked for us at Hovoli, a taverna in town that specialises in chicken and pork gyros as big as your head. This is good news as my head is the only bit of me that isn’t full.

The guide then completes the tour by conjuring a box of loukoumades (Greek doughnuts) and plonking them in the middle of the table. It would be rude not to but it’s then that I decide to walk back to the ship. The long way.