A Rich and Fragrant Bread

Without eggs or butter, this Lenten (vegan) cake-like bread is a modern version of the traditional festive, Easter tsoureki.

I have baked many Lenten tsourekia (plural from tsoureki), which, if you take out the eggs and butter, is essentially a kind of challah with different spices –we come to these later. But my challah-like tsoureki has not the great flavor and cake-like crumb that @BrianLevy has created.

A professional baker, author of "Good & Sweet," a marvelous book of Naturally Sweetened cakes, breads, and other treats, Levy posted the original recipe last year; but only now I decided to try it.

I could never have imagined using creamed cashews instead of eggs. “Cashews lend themselves to being easily pureed into a fat- and protein-rich cream with a sweet, subtly nutty flavor. They even share a hint of eggs’ sulfury flavor as well as their emulsifying power,” wrote Levy in another recipe he had created.

For this one he wrote: “I’ll just say that oats, olive oil, and cashews do some amazing work here, and this recipe [vegan tsoureki] is worth trying no matter what you think of dairy and eggs.” And I couldn’t agree more!

Last fall I used the kitchen of a large resort hotel in southern Peloponnese to prepare the dishes that were photographed for the EAT-Lancet project. As I was rolling grape leaves on my corner, one of the hotel’s prep cooks filled a saucepan with water, added a fair amount of cashews and placed them in the back of the stove to simmer for more than an hour.

When I asked her, she told me that they would be mashed to become the base of a vegan tzatziki. As I rely on the plethora of our traditional Lenten dishes and hardly ever try to transform into vegan dishes that are not, I had never heard, or imagined that raw cashews were used to make vegan cream… Tasting this vegan tzatziki later, I found it quite good!

Enticing aroma and strong flour

The fragrant flavor of tsoureki, both the festive egg-butter one, as well as this Lenten version, relies on the sweet aroma of mastic and mahlep. Mastic is the crystalized sap of a wild pistachio shrub/tree that grows on the island of Chios.

Sorting the clean mastic ‘tears’ from a pile of crystalized sap collected under the mastic trees (photo from the Chios Mastic Museum)

Mahlep is the seed kernel of Prunus mahaleb (Mahaleb or St Lucie cherry). I particularly like its sweet aroma and I often use it, combined with ground coriander and anise seeds, in my regular breads.

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While mahlep can be grinded in a spice grinder, mastic needs to be carefully crushed in a mortar, together with sugar. It tends to melt and stick to the blades of the spice grinder destroying it, so never grind mastic in the grinder.

This time of year, especially, on the shelves of Greek supermarkets we find bags of ‘tsoureki flour’ which is the strongest we can get. Stronger even than the one labelled ‘pizza flour, or 00.’ ‘Tsoureki flour’ has 26% protein, while ‘Pizza flour’ has 21%.

Lenten (Vegan) TSOUREKI

Adapted from Brian Levy.

In the original recipe the cashews and oats are mashed with cold water in a high-speed blender to get the smooth mixture. But because my blender is not the best, I used warm water to make sure no nut bits remain. I decided to skip heating the cream in a pan before adding the olive oil, since it was already quite warm. I omitted vanilla, increasing the amount of orange zest, and used more fresh orange juice.

I shaped a large braided tsoureki, which I gifted to a friend before photographing it(!) and simply twisted the log of the smaller one.

I hope Brian will not mind my shortcuts and changes…

Makes 2 braided loaves

CASHEW-OAT CREAM MIXTURE:

1 cup (115 grams) raw cashews
1 cup (100 g) rolled oats