Tomato

Tomatoes are a genuinely recent arrival in Greek cooking despite how central they now seem, reaching the Mediterranean from the Americas only after 1500 and not becoming a serious kitchen staple in Greece until the 19th century. Once they did arrive, they took over completely, becoming the base liquid for the entire ladera family of slow-cooked vegetable dishes and for most of the country's braises and stews.

Grated raw tomato, rather than a cooked puree, is a specifically Greek technique worth knowing: the flesh is grated on the coarse side of a box grater directly into a dish, leaving the skin behind in your hand, which gives a fresher, less processed base to a sauce than a tinned puree would. Dakos, the Cretan barley rusk dish, depends entirely on this raw grated technique.

Small, intensely flavoured tomatoes grown on Santorini's volcanic soil, in conditions too dry and mineral-poor for most other tomato varieties to thrive, are treated as a genuinely distinct and prized ingredient from ordinary tomatoes, valued specifically for that concentrated, almost sun-dried sweetness the harsh growing conditions produce.