Greek cuisine is a Mediterranean cuisine. Contemporary Greek cookery makes wide use of vegetables, olive oil, grains, fish, wine and meat. Other important ingredients include olives, pasta, cheese, lemon juice, herbs, bread and yoghurt. The most commonly used grain is wheat; barley is also used. Common dessert ingredients include nuts, honey, fruits and filo pastries.
It is strongly influenced by Ottoman cuisine and, especially in the cuisine of Anatolian Greeks, shares foods such as baklava, tzatziki, gyros, moussaka, dolmades and keftedes with neighbouring countries. To an even greater extent, it is influenced by Italian cuisine and cuisines from other neighbouring southern European countries.
With minimal natural resources of its own, Hydra has historically sourced its ingredients from the neighbouring Peloponnese, while its waters have supplied the rest. The island’s cuisine is defined by seafood – red mullets on toast, wine-braised octopus, stuffed squid, cuttlefish with ink pilaf, fish soup – alongside Arvanitiko gogges pasta, hortopita, and snail stew. In cooler months, arnaki kapamas (lamb with cinnamon and cloves) and roast meat with quinces take over, while the island’s almond sweets, scented with flower water and shaped like small pears, remain an enduring signature.