A Food Lover's Guide to Crete

By The Health Benefits of a Mediterranean Eating Pattern
Comments 35
23 Jul 2026

A Food Lover's Guide to Crete

Crete sits far enough south that its kitchen feels closer to the Levant than to northern Europe, yet the cooking itself is quietly simple. A handful of ingredients do most of the work: peppery green olive oil, wild herbs picked from the hillside, salty sheep's cheese, barley rusks and whatever the garden or the shore has offered that morning. This is a guide for anyone who has eaten well on the island and wants to bring some of it home to a British kitchen and a British garden.

The Cretan Larder, in Brief

Cretan food is not complicated, but it is very particular. The island's table rests on five pillars, and once you understand them, the recipes make sense.

Olive oil, used with a generosity that shocks most visitors — poured over bread, over beans, over cheese, over salad that has never seen a leaf of lettuce.
Wild greens, collectively called horta, boiled and dressed with oil and lemon, or folded into pies.
Sheep's and goat's cheese, from soft, milky mizithra to firm graviera aged with thyme.
Barley, in rusks (paximadia) that survive months in a tin and soften beautifully under tomato and oil.
Mountain herbs, dried in bunches and used as medicine, tea and seasoning all at once.

Olive Oil: Buy It Like a Cretan

Most Cretan oil is pressed from Koroneiki olives, a small, stubborn fruit that gives a low yield and a fierce, grassy oil with a peppery tickle at the back of the throat. That tickle is a good sign, not a fault: it comes from compounds that fade as oil ages. Family mills, many of them tiny, press within hours of picking, usually between November and January.

A few practical rules for buying and keeping it:

Look for a harvest date, not just a best-before. Oil is at its best for about eighteen months.
Choose dark glass or tins in a litre or smaller, and store it cool and dark — never on a sunny windowsill beside the hob.
Expect cloudiness and sediment in early-harvest oil. It is unfiltered, and it will settle.
Pour a little into a shot glass, warm it in your hands, sip, then breathe out through your nose. You should taste artichoke, cut grass, maybe tomato leaf.

Use the good stuff raw — over bread, beans, grilled fish, cooked greens — and keep a cheaper bottle for roasting.

Herbs of the Mountains

Cretan hillsides smell of thyme in June, and much of the island's seasoning grows wild rather than in beds. Dried bunches hang in every kitchen, and a single pinch goes a long way.

Thyme (thymari) — the backbone of grilled meat, roast potatoes and sheep's cheese.
Oregano (rigani) — dried hard, crumbled over tomato, feta-style cheese and olives.
Sage and wild marjoram — for stuffings, bean dishes and oily fish.
Dittany (erontas) — a Cretan speciality, gently aromatic, lovely in a tea with honey.
Mountain tea (malotira) — served after dinner instead of coffee, often with a spoonful of thyme honey.

Buy herbs dried on the stem rather than pre-crumbled, crush them between your palms just before use, and replace them yearly. Old dust in a jar is not the same ingredient.

Cheese, Raki and the Meze Table

Sheep and goats graze the same fragrant hills as the herbs, and you can taste it. Mizithra is fresh, soft and slightly sweet — spoon it over rusks with honey for breakfast. Graviera is the aged one, nutty and firm, excellent grated or fried in thick slices. Anthotyro is light and dry, often used in pastries and pies.

Raki (also called tsikoudia) is distilled from grape skins after the wine pressing. It is clear, unsweetened and drunk ice-cold in small glasses alongside meze — never as a shot, always slowly. A bottle from a family still is often around 40 per cent, so treat it gently.

The classic meze combination costs very little: dakos (a barley rusk soaked in water, topped with grated tomato, mizithra and a generous pour of oil), a bowl of olives, a plate of grilled cheese, and a glass of raki.

Growing a Cretan Corner in a British Garden

You cannot replicate a Cretan summer in Sheffield, but you can grow the herbs that carry the flavour, provided you solve one problem: drainage. Mediterranean plants rot in wet British winters far more often than they freeze.

Mix peat-free compost with horticultural grit roughly half and half, and plant in terracotta or unglazed pots.
Raise pots on feet or bricks so water never sits underneath, and move them against a south-facing wall over winter.
Grow thyme, oregano, sage, rosemary and winter savory from small plants — they are far more reliable than seed outdoors.
Keep a bay tree and an olive tree in pots, wrapping the pot in fleece in hard frost and sheltering it from cold wind, which does more damage than cold alone.
Try tomatoes under glass. Cretan beefsteak types need heat, but a greenhouse or a warm porch will ripen them by late summer.

Pick herbs in the morning before flowering, tie them in small bunches and dry them somewhere dark and airy, or freeze chopped thyme and oregano in oil.

Where to Look in the UK

Greek and Middle Eastern grocers, delis and larger Mediterranean sections now stock Kritiko-style olive oil, barley rusks, graviera and raki, and mail-order specialists send oil pressed in the same winter. Ask for early-harvest oil, check the date, and buy the smallest tin you will use in six months. Everything else — tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, a scoop of sheep's cheese — is already in your local shop.

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5 Comments

Robert Sonny says Jul 21, 2024 at 10:00am

I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system
Reply
- John Abraham says Jul 21, 2024 at 10:00am
  
  I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system
  Reply
  - Robert Sonnysays Jul 21, 2024 at 10:00am
    
    I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system
    Reply
Robert Sonny says Jul 21, 2024 at 10:00am

I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system
Reply

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