Ancient Greek Loukoumades Recipe | Traditional Greek doughnuts (2024)

FAQs

Did ancient Greeks eat loukoumades? ›

Loukoumades have a long history that dates back to the first Olympic Games. Greeks revered the Gods, and the reward was in the form of “honey tokens,” which were pieces of fried dough dusted with honey. Al-Baghdadi first identified the dish as luqmat al-qdi in the 13th century.

Loukoumades are a traditional Greek street food delicacy. It's a crisp and fluffy bite-sized type of doughnut. Sometimes you can find they are called Greek doughnuts.

An early version of a deep-fried dough ball originated in Ancient Rome when people started frying dough and putting sugar or cinnamon on it. Similar types of fried dough recipes have either spread to, or originated, in other parts of Europe and the World.

Cultures all over the world have been consuming fried dough for centuries. Traces of fried dough foods have been found in prehistoric Native American settlements, and sweetened fried doughs are known to have been eaten by the ancient Romans and Greeks.

They were often prepared for special occasions and religious festivals—the earliest references to a similar dessert date back to the Ancient Greek Olympic Games. Throughout history, variations of loukoumades can be found in various cultures across the Mediterranean and Middle East, each with unique names and flavors.

Since dinner was the most important meal, this is where most of the foods were consumed. At dinner, the Ancient Greeks would eat: eggs (from quail and hens), fish, legumes, olives, cheeses, breads, figs, and any vegetables they could grow and were in season.

In ancient Greece, fruit and vegetables were a significant part of the diet, as the ancient Greeks consumed much less meat than in the typical diet of modern societies. Legumes would have been important crops, as their ability to replenish exhausted soil was known at least by the time of Xenophon.

Sugar, sweet desserts, and salt were rarely consumed, and animal products except for seafood and yogurt and cheese were less frequently consumed.

Greece. The dish called loukoumádes (λουκουμάδες) is a mainstay of Greek cooking, in particular in the south of Greece, and is a popular street food served with any combination of honey, cinnamon, walnuts and chocolate sauce.

For those of you not familiar with loukoumades, they are the most heavenly fried donuts; served warm, drizzled with honey syrup and cinnamon, sometimes sprinkled with walnuts or toasted sesame. They are served throughout Greece, where the history of this donut can be traced back to the first Olympic Games in 776 BC.

What does gia su mean in Greek? ›

Saying Hello

Therefore, Γεια σου (Ya su) is used when greeting one person, whereas Γεια σας (Ya sas) is commonly used for greeting more than one individual—or an individual with whom you need to be polite and speak formal Greek to.

It is commonly used to represent real and metaphorical doughnuts, breakfast, bakeries and baked foods, snacks, coffee breaks, The Simpsons, and negative stereotypes of police officers.

The Greek proof for this is loukoumades, little deep fried doughnuts doused in syrup or honey and sprinkled in cinnamon or sugar that taste as good as they sound. Unlike their sister-desserts around the world, however—beignets in France, churros in Spain and jalebi in India, and (dare I say it?)

But the doughnut proper (if that's the right word) supposedly came to Manhattan (then still New Amsterdam) under the unappetizing Dutch name of olykoeks--"oily cakes."

Perhaps most notably, fasnachts are crafted using potatoes – sometimes mashed, sometimes boiled and blended into dough – while donuts typically have wheat flour as the base carbohydrate. As a result, fasnachts are also generally a bit heavier and denser than your typical donut and not quite as sweet.

Lokma, is a dessert made of leavened and deep fried dough balls, soaked in syrup or honey, sometimes coated with cinnamon or other ingredients. The dish was described as early as the 13th century by al-Baghdadi as luqmat al-qādi (لُقْمَةُ ٱلْقَاضِيِ), "judge's morsels".

The difference between these and a basic doughnut is that paczki are made with a very rich, sweet yeast dough consisting of eggs, butter and milk. Sort of like a brioche doughnut, only better, if you can imagine!