There’s nothing like travel to broaden the mind - especially in the world of cookery where ideas from other countries can massively expand your culinary range.

Dimos Balopoulos is head chef at the Daios Cove five star luxury resort in eastern Crete, and last weekend he was telling me how each winter his bosses send him around the world to work for short spells in top kitchens so that he can expand his kitchen’s repertoire. 

And if it’s good enough for a leading light like Dimos, it’s good enough for an amateur like me. Indeed, one reason I was in Crete was to learn a bit more about how the Greeks in general - and the Cretans in particular - centre all their culinary practices on the quality of local ingredients. 

Here’s an unlikely example which Cretan home-cooks share with their neighbours across the Aegean in Puglia - it concerns what they call “wild greens” (horta in Greece), plants which most English people would describe as weeds. As wild edible plants pop their heads above the rocky soil in both places, so they’ll be collected daily by men and women from the rural villages, and at weekends by those who live in towns.  

“You can find many varieties in Crete which come out season by season,” says Dimos. “So what local people do is collect them and preserve them - you can’t eat all you pick. Some they pickle, others they salt or freeze. And they use them all year.”

He is talking about things like dandelion leaves, wild rocket, even thistle stalks. “First the put them in salt and then wash them and put them in (white wine) vinegar in a jar. That is happening in every Cretan farm because they cannot eat all they pick when it’s in season.”

And so the pickled vegetables - which are delicious - have become a feature of Cretan cuisine. One which a top chef like Dimos adapts and extends until pickled vegetables become a small but important signature of his five-star cooking. 

Why aren’t we pickling wild vegetables? Why don’t we have that kind of foraging as part of our culinary tradition? Such things are a mystery to me. It’s not as if our forefathers always lived so high on the hog, they didn’t go hungry. Wild greens, seaweeds and other things besides were left untouched… We’ve got them, but for some reason the peasants of this land never ate them, no matter how desperate they became. 

If I am wrong about that and they did - then how is it the routine never became a part of a tradition which saw the dishes being handed down?      

What I like about talking to chefs like Dimos is how linked with such tradition - and with such simple local ingredients - they seem to be. We were talking about eating sea-urchin - the spiny shellfish which he told me had become illegal to harvest in Crete. Not that this seems to stop anyone from gingerly picking them out of the rocks - indeed one cove I visited was black with them.  

“With the sea urchins you are literally eating the sea when it comes to the flavour,” said Dimos. “We like them best simply eaten fresh on their own. But then we can adapt them into the sort of cooking we do here. 

“Every winter the hotel sends us around the world looking for fresh ideas. Last year we went to Oslo and worked there in a three-Michelin star restaurant called Maaemo. The year before we went to Copenhagen and worked at Kadeau. These are some of the very best restaurants in the world. So yes, we can say that we travel and pick up ideas - to see what is going on and to open our eyes.

“What we do at Daios Cove is call in all the producers to show us what they have - this is happening at the beginning of the season and we choose all the ingredients and make a deal with them for the whole year. We are one of the very few hotels doing that. We have this one day when they all come here - and we do a deal with the man, say, who is going to produce us our tomatoes. He comes from 40 minutes away and he grows his tomatoes out in the sunshine and they are superb.  

“All our seafood is coming from around this island. Every morning I go to the fish market in town (Agios Nikolaos) and every night they call me - even at one at night - to tell me if there’s anything special which they will buy straight from the boat for me.

“What we do here is combine what happens in a local farmhouse kitchen with modern techniques from around the world,” said Dimos who pointed to one dish I’d enjoyed that lunchtime. “Your starter was a kind of risotto with a greek salad inside and raw prawns that have been ‘ceviched’ for ten minutes in lemon juice, pepper and paprika. We cut the prawns in half to marinate them - and we might also add sea urchin.”

It was sensational. The freshness of a Greek salad, the creaminess of a risotto and the raw citric fishiness of prawns and urchin combined to create something that arguably encapsulated eastern Crete in a single mouthful. 

The challenge I’ve given myself is to replicate the dish loosely by using fabulous fresh ingredients from here in the UK. The citrus and the rice wouldn’t be local but I might find alternatives - even so, it should be possible to emulate the idea and create some morsel that sums up Cornwall, say, in one happy bite.

RECIPE from Dimos Balopoulos, head chef at the Daios Cove, Crete.

Smoked octopus escabeche with black guacamole and salad of fermented cucumber, turnip. 

Ingredients:

For the Octopus

600-700 gr octopus

Salt- pepper to taste

1 medium onion

4 Bay leaves

Olive oil

½ cup red wine

For the black guacamole

2 avocados peeled and pitted

1 green chilli 
1/2 cup fresh coriander 
salt pepper to taste

30 ml lime juice

1 tsp squid ink

For the escabeche 

360ml white balsamic vinegar 
120ml rice vinegar 
6 pieces all spice berries 
2 tsp smoked paprika 

7 garlic gloves diced
4 white onions diced
1 chilli 
240 ml extra virgin olive oil
salt 
60 gr roasted almonds  

Smoked Octopus:

Pre-heat the oven on 160°C. Wash the octopus and remove its head. Then separate the tentacles, cut them into long strips and place them in paper foil with olive oil, salt and pepper, the onion, the bay leaves, and drizzle it with red wine. Wrap in oven proof baking paper and then wrap again with aluminium foil Place in the oven for one hour. When you remove it from the oven, separate octopus from the juices.

Black Guacamole:

In a blender add the avocado first and all the ingredients to make a creamy black sauce.

Escabeche

In a frying pan heat the olive oil, onions, garlic until they’ve turned transparent. Then transfer to a blender with the rest of the ingredients and blend until it turns into a smooth cream.

Salad

Lightly pickled cucumber cut in julienne style

Lightly pickled turnip julienne style

Chopped cherry tomatoes

Spoonful of capers

Spoonful of olives

onion that you have pickled briefly

To serve:

Mix and place the salad on a plate then add the guacamole and either place the octopus which has been combined with the escabeche sauce or place the octopus with the sauce on the top.