Tsoureki - Τσουρέκι,
the sweet Easter bread of Greece

If, in Italy, the traditional Easter cake is the dove, in Greece there is instead the tsoureki!
A sweet bread, packaged in the shape of a braid (left straight or curved to form a crown) which always belongs to the category of sweet leavened products for special occasions.

A sweet characterized by a very particular aroma, given by three different spices: cardamom, mahlepi and Chios mastic.
If the first is easy to find, the other two can be found either on site or in some specialized shop.

Clearly mine drug dealer of exotic ingredients, just before Easter, he had it ready on the table, next to the till!

With some expedients and other aromas you can try to reconstruct the flavor of these spices but, however good the result, that certain scent of Greece will always be missing.

So let's get busy finding everything and then, having lined up all the ingredients, let's get to work!

Ingredients, for one or two braids:

Preparation:

First prepare a leaven by mixing all the milk and water in a bowl and dissolve the yeast in it; add an equal weight of flour (taken from flour already weighed and sieved), mix well and leave to rest covered and in the oven off for at least twenty minutes.

Meanwhile, melt the butter in a bain-marie and let it cool.

In a small bowl, put the whole eggs with the sugar and whisk them for a long time (possibly with an electric whisk), as if preparing a Genoese pasta, up to double the volume; the ideal would be to have the eggs at room temperature and whip them by keeping the bowl close to a heat source or even suspended for the first two minutes over a saucepan with boiling water.

Pour in the now cooled melted butter and mix again with a whisk.

Complete with the yeast, mix and...

As soon as the flour has been absorbed, pass gradually at an increasingly higher speed (it will take about ten minutes) until the dough tends to detach from the bowl (in practice it will be well strung).
Collect the dough into a ball and put it in a bowl at least three times the volume of the dough previously greased with oil.

Cover well with plastic (I use a plastic bag sealed with a clothespin ...) and let it rise in a warm place and away from drafts for at least a couple of hours: the dough must at least double.

Put the bowl in the fridge for the night.

In the morning remove the bowl from the fridge and turn the dough over onto the work surface dusted with flour and knead it with your hands (or better with tarot cards) giving two or three turns of folds.
We divide the dough into two parts or three parts depending on the type of braid you want to form (for the two-part braid, see the Swiss braid).
You can leave the braid straight or gather it into a crown; traditionally, between some folds of the straight braid – or in the center of the one gathered in a crown – an egg is added, colored red.

Arrange the cake on a baking tray covered with baking paper, cover it (as above: I use a large plastic bag) and put it back in the turned off oven for the last leavening: it will take a couple of hours.

After this time and with the braid now doubled in size, prepare to decorate it while heating the (static) oven to 185°C.

Beat an egg together with the milk and carefully brush the surface of the braid; then sprinkle it with the flaked almonds applying slight pressure with the palms of your hands to make them adhere.
Complete with the granulated sugar and, as soon as the oven is heated, place in the oven and leave to cook for 45 minutes.

If at one point the surface tends to color too much (after about 25'), place an aluminum sheet on it.

Once the cooking time has elapsed, turn off the oven and open it completely for one minute; then leave the dove for another ten minutes with the oven semi-open.

Remove from the oven and leave to cool on a wire rack.

Dust, if you like, with icing sugar, and wait, before slicing, for the braid to be completely cooled!

The consistency of the dough will be soft, light and spongy.

Good job and, then, bon appetit!

ADVICES AND NOTES:

•  Recipe, text only: to print or download.
• Mahlepi (plum almond powder) photo 
• Putty of Chios (a wild resin). photo
• In the absence of these two spices, we can recall – very remotely – their aroma, by dissolving pure vanilla mixed with orange peel and bitter almond aroma in a little sweet wine.
• Egg: as you can see from the photos, it has not been colored red; and Signora Polissena, my acquaintance and expert Cretan restaurateur, immediately proceeded to scold me!
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• See also other leavened products for special occasions: Il gugelhupf, Venetian, easy and affordable for everyone, Venetian blinds, the small ones, for the snack, the Easter dove.

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