A recipe for tsoureki (Greek Easter bread) (2024)

FAQs

What is Greek Easter bread made of? ›

Ahh the tsoureki! This is a sweet bread made traditionally for Easter (but really you can have it as a treat year-round). It is soft, tender, lightly sweet and so aromatic! It is made with eggs, milk and butter plus the secret aromatic ingredients.

What's in Easter bread? Similar to challah, Easter bread is made from an enriched dough, which means it includes richer ingredients like butter, milk, and sugar. Along with adding flavor to the Easter bread, these ingredients make it extra tender and soft.

Greek bread typically consists of ingredients such as flour, water, salt, yeast and olive oil. It can be prepared in a variety of ways including making it into flatbreads, or baking it in the oven to create loaves. Greek bread is often used for dipping sauces and spreads like tzatziki.

Red eggs (the red symbolising Christ's blood) spell Easter to every Greek person. So adorning a tsoureki (or Greek brioche) with them is like putting ornaments on a Christmas tree: without them, it's just a plain old tree.

Prosphora is a Greek word meaning "offering." Historically, the bread was not only a gift for use in the Divine Liturgy, but it was also a gift to feed the poor. Prosphora is made of just four ingredients: Unbleached flour. Yeast.

Terkenlis Tsoureki Traditional (brioche) 500g Ingredients Wheat flour, sugar, water, eggs, cow milk butter, vegetable fats and oils, (palm oil, hydrogenated palm oil), milk, yeast, spices, salt, emulsifier: mono and diglycerides of fatty acids, almonds, preservative: calcium propionate.

Leaving the bread in the oven too long will dry out bread. If the bread has finished baking before the minimum time stated in the recipe, the oven temperature may not be correct. To insure the correct temperature each time you bake, always use an oven thermometer. Place it in the center of the oven.

The Easter bread tradition:

The bread varies in its symbolism based on the shape—when baked into a wreath, the bread is supposed to symbolize the crown of thorns. When braided into three long pieces, the dough represents the Holy Trinity.

It is quiet similar to Jewish challah bread or French brioche but what sets it apart is its flavour. Tsoureki is flavoured with mastic/mastica/mastiha and mahlab/mahlepi, orange zest and often times cardamom. Those flavours make this bread so fragrant and are classic to the Greek version of this style bread.

The most common grain used was barley. This bread was called maza and was simply ground barley mixed with water, then cooked over a fire. There are some mentions of leavened bread by ancient Greek authors but this was a rarity. To grind the grain the ancient Greeks used querns.

Why is Greek bread yellow? ›

It's also known as yellow bread because the semolina flour in the bread gives it a little yellow color. The house smells amazing while you're making it, and homemade bread is just beautiful to look at. It's hearty, homemade, and more delicious than anything you can buy from the store.

Breads similar to the tsoureki are known to have been made in Byzantine times. Called “kollyrides,” they were considered the special breads of Easter. They also had different shapes and had a red egg in the middle. The name tsoureki comes from the Turkish word “corek” which refers to any bread made with yeast dough.

Tsoureki is traditionally baked on Holy Thursday, and then eaten on Easter Sunday. Today though, you can pretty much get tsoureki all through the year.

Making tsoureki is an important Easter tradition in Greece. It is prepared on Holy Thursday and eaten on Easter as the three braids of the bread represent the Holy Trinity.

Tsoureki is usually made into a plaited loaf or a wreath, the ring shape representing the Easter theme of renewal. The red eggs that adorn Tsoureki symbolise Christ's blood and rebirth and are placed into the soft dough and baked with the bread.

Affordable- the ingredients of this recipe are super affordable and basic like flour, water, yeast, sugar, and salt. Freezer friendly- these pitas freeze amazingly! Every time you want fresh pita bread, remove one from the freezer, defrost it in the microwave, and then reheat it in the oven!

Dough loaves were baked at home in a clay oven (ἰπνός ipnós) set on legs. Bread wheat, difficult to grow in Mediterranean climates, and the white bread made from it, were associated with the upper classes in the ancient Mediterranean, while the poor ate coarse brown breads made from emmer wheat and barley.

On the contrary to any concept of bread we may have nowadays (i.e. wheaten, leavened, baked), was the « maza » of the ancient Greeks, a very popular food made of barley meal, the preparation of which did not involve either leavening or baking (Micha-Lampaki 1984, Braun 1995).