Skip to content
LoginRegister
WhatToEat.Today

Recipes with mastic tears

3 recipes that use mastic tears, with photos, step-by-step instructions and cook times. The quickest, Melitinia, takes 70 minutes. It is most often cooked with caster sugar, cornflour and egg.

Got a few things in the fridge? Search by everything you have

Malban (Egyptian rose and nut jelly sweets)

Malban is the Egyptian cousin of Turkish delight, sold by weight in Cairo sweet shops all year but piled highest for Ramadan nights and the Mawlid sweets of the Prophet's birthday. A syrup of sugar and lemon is cooked with cornflour for the best part of an hour into a thick, clear jelly, scented with rose water and a little mastic and studded with pistachios or hazelnuts. Cut into cubes and rolled in icing sugar, it is soft, springy and chewy, sweet and floral. Serve it with mint tea or Turkish-style coffee. It is naturally egg-free: cornflour, cooked slowly in the syrup, sets it into a firm jelly, with no other setting agent. Chef's tip: whisk the cornflour mixture into the syrup in a thin stream and keep stirring. The common mistake is stopping too early, which gives a soft jelly that weeps and won't hold a cube.

320 minEgyptianDessertsVeganGluten free
by KrazyBadal 0 views

MelitiniaSweet cheese cups with mastic

Santorini's Easter sweet is melitinia: small, thin pastry cups pinched around a soft filling of fresh cheese, sugar and mastic, baked until the tops crack and turn golden. Islanders bake trays of them on Holy Saturday and offer them on Easter Sunday with coffee, and their resinous, piney mastic perfume sets them apart from cheese pastries elsewhere in Greece. Fresh mizithra is the island cheese; ricotta, usually rennet-free, is a good substitute. Common mistake: grinding mastic on its own, which makes it gum up; always crush it with a spoon of sugar. Chef's tip: roll the pastry very thin, about 2 mm, so it bakes crisp around the creamy filling.

70 minGreekBaking
by KrazyBadal 0 views

TsourekiBraided Easter brioche

On Holy Thursday Greek homes braid tsoureki, the shining Easter loaf that is broken on Sunday after the midnight service and eaten for breakfast all week with coffee. It pulls apart in long, feathery strands and smells of mahlab (cherry-stone spice), mastic resin and orange. Common mistake: adding extra flour to a sticky dough; it is meant to be soft, and the long knead and cold rest make it manageable. Chef's tip: grind mastic with a pinch of sugar in a cold mortar; on its own it gums up into sticky lumps.

80 minGreekBaking
by KrazyBadal 0 views

Goes well with mastic tears