Walnuts

Walnuts are the nut most closely tied to Greek dessert cooking, ground fine as the near-entire base of karydopita, a dense, deeply spiced cake that uses walnuts in place of most of the flour a Western cake would use, then soaked in a hot cinnamon-clove syrup the moment it leaves the oven. Epirus, a mountainous region with a long tradition of walnut cultivation, is particularly associated with this style of nut-based baking.

Beyond cakes, chopped or crushed walnuts are one of the most common finishing garnishes across the whole dessert repertoire, scattered over baklava, over a bowl of yogurt and honey, or over the simplest possible dessert of fresh anari cheese with a little honey drizzled on top.

They also turn up, threaded on string, as the base for soutzoukos, whole nuts dipped repeatedly in thickened grape must until a firm, chewy coating builds up in layers, a technique shared with the Georgian sweet churchkhela and found in various forms across the wider Caucasus and eastern Mediterranean.