Once the math was behind us, then came the fun part: actually making the bread dough. It was simple but time consuming since the dough had to rise for over an hour so that the bread would be nice and tender. It was hard to be patient with such delicious scents filling my kitchen!
While the bread rose, we mixed the tahini filling, which consisted of tahini paste, sugar, and cinnamon. In more traditional recipes than the one we followed, I’ve heard that carob syrup is used instead of sugar. Here’s a close-up of a dark, carob-flavored tahini pie.
But my favorite part came last. We flattened the dough and cut it into long strips, using a knife to paint each one with sweet tahini filling. We then twisted the strips closed into doughy snakes, each of which we spiraled into a round tahini pie oozing with gooey goodness. Forty painfully slow minutes later, they were baked and ready to eat! Now are you ready to eat?
Tahini pies are connected to the local culture and environment through the ingredients they contain—and don’t contain.
Let’s start with what they don’t contain: dairy, eggs, butter, milk, or other animal products. This means that tahini pie is considered to be a “fasting” bread that can be eaten during the fasting days before Christmas and during Lent, a period leading up to Easter in the Greek Orthodox Church, the branch of Christianity most commonly practiced in the Greek-Cypriot community. Fasting here involves limiting the type of food eaten in order to cleanse the body and spirit in preparation for Christmas and/or Easter, the most important Greek Orthodox holiday.
