Kalitsounia

After coming home from an intense and stressful school or workday, everybody of us just wants to enjoy something sweet and delicious and besides that getting more energy for the rest of the day again. For our category Culture, I will present you another traditional Greek specialty for you which is a dessert and called Kalitsounia or Lichnarakia.

It fits perfectly for such a well-known mentioned situation or even traditional for celebrations and special events like Easter Sunday. The dessert is a cheese pastry and it is especially quite popular on the Greek island Crete. There on the island Crete, it is a holiday tradition. But meanwhile, the specialty is eaten throughout the year, mostly on celebrations. 

What you need for the dough of the pastry:

• 1 cup of olive oil
• 1 cup of strained yogurt
• 1 egg
• 1¹/₂ cup of sugar
• 1kg flour 
• 4 tsp baking powder
• ½ tsp vanilla extract 
• The juice of ½ orange
• Zest of 1 lemon 

What you need for the filling:

• 1kg of fresh soft cheese, for that you can use myzithra cheese, mascarpone or ricotta 
• 1 cup of sugar
• 1 egg and 1 egg white
• 1 tsp powdered cinnamon

What you need for the topping:

• 2 eggs
• 1 tbsp of water
• 1 tbsp of powdered cinnamon

At first, we will prepare the dough of the “Kalitsounia”. We just have to add the sugar, olive oil, yogurt and eggs into a large bowl. The next step is to blend the texture of the ingredients, you can use your hands for that. Now we can put the lemon zest, orange juice and vanilla extract into the mixture and we blend it again. We still have the flour and the baking powder left for the dough. Therefore, while blending the dough, we will sieve the flour and the baking powder into the bowl. Probably, the dough is still quite sticky and hard. Accordingly, we will now knead the dough until you can feel a soft dough in your hands.

Finally, we can rest the dough for 30 minutes. During the time, we now move forward to the next step: the filling. We just have to take a new bowl and put the cheese crushed up into it. Afterwards, we take the eggs, sugar and the cinnamon and fill them into the bowl too. We can now blend the mixture well like we already did it for the dough in the beginning. 

The dough is ready to be placed on a floured surface. We take a rolling pin, roll out the dough slim and cut out the dough into some circles. We still have the filling. Therefore, we take a spoonful of the cheese filling and place it in the center of the circles. Then, we try to raise up the rim and squeeze the edges around the filling. 

The Kalitsounia can be placed on a baking tray with parchment paper. While the Kalitsounia is resting for 20 minutes, we take two eggs and whisk them into a bowl of one tbsp. of water. After the 20 minutes, we can take the egg mixture and brush it on the Kalitsounia. Now we can preheat the temperature of the oven to 180-200 degrees and strew some cinnamon powder on the pastry. As soon as the temperature has reached a warm temperature, we can put the Kalitsounia in the oven for 25 minutes.

Enjoy your Kalitsounia! 

Source: https://www.mygreekdish.com/recipe/