By Dimitri C. Michalakis
“This was an idea that I had for years,” says George Stamou, the producer of The Cooking Odyssey, a groundbreaking television show on Greek cuisine premiering nationwide on PBS in the coming weeks that is both travelogue and cooking extravaganza. “We go to different regions of Greece to show both the beauty and the culture, and at the same time we have local people give us local recipes and demonstrate it to our host chef, who comes back to the studio kitchen in New York and teaches the audience how to cook them.”
The chef is 32-year-old Yannis Mameletzis, who has a foot in several continents (born in Greece, moved to the States, currently lives in England) and who is a pastry chef for Jamie Oliver (The Naked Chef), president of the Oxford University Gastronomy Society, and a popular blogger (My Little Baklava) on food and food policy.
“I was familiar with a good number of these recipes,” says the chef, who also has a public health degree from Yale and is now studying for his molecular epidemiology doctorate at Oxford. “But it’s something else when you go to the actual location and use the local ingredients: when you use a tomato grown in volcanic soil and greens from the local mountainside. You can’t get that out of a cookbook or when you learn the recipe in a restaurant setting.”
Starting this past summer, the show visited more than a dozen regions of Greece (from Mykonos to Athens to Meteora) and whipped up recipes gathered from yiayiades to papoudes to tavern owners.
“To tell you the truth, the people embraced us,” says Stamou (whose crew once famously took a one-hour break to enjoy the local figs). “People kept saying, ‘Hey, guys, we have a recipe for you, come to our place.’ Going to Trikala, for example, Yannis was cooking with four or five or the local women and they were cooking using the brick oven in their yard. It was a unique and authentic experience.”
Made more so because of the culture the show absorbed on location along with the recipes. The crew crashed a village wedding in Metsovo and, appropriately, a festival for pita in Meteora.
“Yannis was cooking with these ladies in their yard and when they were done they said to us, ‘Oh, by the way, tomorrow night in the square we have a panygiri’,” Stamou remembers. “’We celebrate the pita.’ So we went to this place the following night and they had music, foustaneles, tsiolades, and Yannis was dancing with them—it was a unique thing. When you see it on TV, you won’t believe it. And we couldn’t believe it ourselves, because it was spontaneous.”
The recipes were then brought to The Cooking Odyssey studio in New York and recreated for the cameras, some with guest notables such as celebrated French pastry chef Francois Payard (who made a Greek fusion dessert from yogurt, honey, kataifi and strawberries). “The premise of the show is to have the travel portion, but then come back to the kitchen and reproduce it for an American audience and make it user-friendly,” says Mameletzis.
It’s not easy to reproduce the unique flavors of Greece (tomatoes from Santorini that pack a flavor punch because they’re grown in volcanic soil) so Chef Yannis, as befitting a teacher (he’s taught at Yale and Oxford) educated viewers on how to improvise with the ingredients on hand.
“He used ingredients such as yogurt,” says Stamou, “which Americans think you eat with honey or fruit, and he cooked with it: he made pites with yogurt and desserts with yogurt. He also told viewers that if you can’t find a particular cheese from Greece, you can use an American cheese or Italian cheese from the supermarket. The idea is that you can cook anything based on the Mediterranean diet, a diet good for you, and you don’t have to travel all over the world to get the ingredients.”
The show is being produced (among the few PBS shows shot totally in high definition) by Stamou’s Divine Media Group here in New York (which has done feature films as well as documentaries and TV both here and abroad) together with Arts n Sports in Greece, a production company headed by Nikos Ververidis, who created the popular Greek cooking show The Hungry Bear (Nistiko Arkoudi).
The studio in New York is also a first: 100% environmentally-friendly and built from recyclable material. “Kohler gave us a new series of products: recyclable sinks, and faucets that save water,” says Stamou. “And we used a countertop manufactured by Cosentino which is made from crushed glass and ceramics mixed with corn oil”.
One season of the show is already in the can and PBS liked it well enough to order a second season. Together with his other commitments (he’s also a competitive archer), this will make Chef Mameletzis a very busy man.
“But I’m passionate about food,” he says (he got his start in his uncle’s restaurant in Manchester, New Hampshire and he’s taught cooking seminars at Yale). “And in doing this I met people who also have a passion for their cuisine and that’s where we saw eye-to-eye. That was the most memorable thing to me about this experience in traveling around Greece: we actually built relationships with people who also shared a passion for food and a passion for our heritage that was most beautiful.”
Showing the food of Greece in its natural element and showing the culture that nurtured it is an equal passion with Stamou.
“I hope Greeks in the States and Greeks all over the world and in Greece appreciate what we did, because I say it with pride,” he says. “I think we did something that America needed: Americans needed to realize that Greece is more than Athens and Mykonos, that there are other places worth a visit, and that Greek food is more than diner food. There’s much more.”
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