Makarounes Karpathou Recipe (Karpathos Hand-Rolled Pasta)

Makarounes are Karpathos's own contribution to the small family of thick, hand-shaped pasta found across several Greek islands, each with its own name and slight variation but a shared underlying idea: simple flour and water dough, shaped by hand into short, thick pieces, boiled, and tossed with very little beyond onion and cheese.

The onion is the real centrepiece here almost as much as the pasta itself, cooked low and slow until it collapses into a dark, sweet, almost jammy mass that coats the pasta far more richly than its short cooking time would suggest possible. Rushing this stage is the most common way this simple dish falls short.

This is genuinely humble, filling food, closer in spirit to a rustic peasant dish than anything elaborate, and it rewards patience with the onion far more than any complicated technique with the pasta itself.

Key preparation steps

1. Make a simple flour and water dough and shape into short, thick pieces.
2. Boil until tender.
3. Cook onion low and slow until deeply caramelised.
4. Toss the pasta with the onion and finish with grated cheese.

Shaping the pasta by hand

A simple dough of flour, water and a pinch of salt, with no egg, rolled and shaped by hand into short, thick pieces, traditionally rolled around a finger or a thin stick to give a slightly hollow, tube-like shape, though rolling into small, thick gnocchi-like ovals is a perfectly good simplification if the traditional shape feels fiddly.

Let the shaped pieces rest and dry slightly on a floured surface for at least twenty minutes before boiling, which helps them hold their shape rather than turning gluey in the water.

The onion, and why it needs real time

Slice a large quantity of onion and cook it in a generous amount of olive oil over a genuinely low heat for at least thirty to forty minutes, stirring occasionally, until it has collapsed down to a deep golden brown, sweet and almost jammy. This is not a ten-minute softening, it is a proper caramelisation, and rushing it with higher heat gives a bitter, unevenly browned result rather than the rich sweetness the dish depends on.

Bringing it together

Boil the pasta in well-salted water until tender, which takes longer than a thin, machine-made pasta given the pieces' thickness, then drain and toss directly with the caramelised onion and its oil. Finish with a generous grating of a hard, salty cheese, such as kefalotyri or a similar aged sheep's cheese, which is really the third essential component alongside the pasta and onion.

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