About Kalliopi's Kitchen

Kalliopi's Kitchen exists because most English-language Greek recipes are too short. They give you a sequence of instructions without telling you why any of it matters, and when the dish goes wrong you have no way of working out which step failed.

Every recipe here is written the other way round. The method is there, but so is the reasoning: why the aubergines are salted, why the syrup must be cold, why the soup comes off the heat before the eggs go in. That is the part that turns a recipe into cooking.

Who writes this

I am Kalliopi Andreou, and to my family I am Yiayia Kalliopi. I am a home cook and a recipe writer, not a chef and not a dietitian, and I think it matters to say so plainly. I grew up in a Greek family kitchen, I have spent a lifetime cooking these dishes and feeding people with them, and I write about them carefully. That is the whole of my authority and I am not going to inflate it.

Everything is cooked in an ordinary domestic kitchen with ordinary equipment, because that is where you will be cooking it.

How the recipes are written

• Each dish carries its Greek name in Greek script, a transliteration and a pronunciation guide.
• Quantities are given in metric and imperial together.
• Where a dish belongs to a particular region, the page says which, and where several regions claim it, the page says that instead of picking a side.
• Every recipe includes a frank account of the most common failure and how to avoid it.
• Nutrition figures are calculated estimates from the ingredient list, not laboratory analysis.

What you will not find here

No star ratings, because the site has no readers yet and inventing them would be dishonest. No testimonials I have not received. No health claims dressed up as tradition. No affiliate links inserted into a recipe where they do not belong.

When the site does start collecting genuine reader ratings, they will appear, and the underlying markup is already built to handle them. Until then there is nothing there, which is as it should be.

Common questions