Seasonal products of the "fertile Lemnia Terra ", from the field, the orchard, the vineyard, the beehive and the producer's flock, straight to the kitchen and on your plate. Traditional flavors that combine altogether Aegean Sea’s fish, livestock and herbs.
Dishes with a strong local identity, bring out the uprooting memories from Asia Minor with an original imam bayıldı, as well as the remembrance of a great visitor in Venizelika bonbons.
Lovers of gastronomic tourism will come along on their own thematic itinerary to the fish taverns and the restaurants of the island.
In local stores one may buy local products in order to take away Limnos flavors. However, if you find yourself as a guest in a Lemnian house, you’ll get unforgettable gastronomic experiences as housewives, using milk, flour, cheese and honey, make splendid unique salty and sweet creations, at the spot!
For breakfast
Come to Limnos and start your day with a slice of mavragani bread, spread with thyme honey, hot fylahtoudia with desalted brine, katmeria sprinkled with kalathaki and steaming hot tsorva. Maybe the names do not mean anything to you, but the flavors are outstanding.
All around more hotels and guesthouses on the island recommend, instead of the "classic" English and American breakfast, treats from the Lemnian land that the locals were traditionally having on the breakfast table. In bakeries in Myrina and villages you will find bread and rusks to accompany with fresh cheese and sheep's yogurt, served with thyme honey and seasonal fruit.
Ideal starter for a winter day is tsorbas, a thick soup made with flomaria and trachana, which the Lemnians used to eat during the cold months to warm up and get strength before going to the fields. Taste katmeria or fladotes, lemnian pancakes stuffed with cheese trimmings. Enjoy lalagites, made from tight gruel with flour and water fried in boiling hot oil and served with honey, cinnamon and sesame seeds. Wiped out by the children at breakfast are fetoydia, fried slices of bread soaked in milk and egg.
If you happen to be a guest in a lemnian house, you will have the chance to taste some of the most typical homemade delicacies. Clickia, ie small cheese bread bites in the shape of snail that the old housewives used to bake for the children of the family, with cheese trimmings from kalathaki and leftovers from the bread dough. Also, the traditional psyroyki, a soup made by splattering the flour with water and creating small buttons manually. On Lazaros’ Saturday, you will be treated with lazaroydia, baked bread in the shape of a small child, filled with "s΄kopagides", dried figs.
Pies
Pies are a separate chapter of the island’s gastronomy, ideal for breakfast, as appetizer to the main meal, or snack throughout the day. Don't miss to taste bougatsa, warm from the bakery with fresh cheese, sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon, the cheese pies and green pies with cheese kalathaki, hummus pies and sesame pies during fasting periods. The famous pumpkin pie, with yellow pumpkin, raisins, cinnamon and homemade layers, wrapped in traditional Greek brioche ie the characteristic volute shape.
"Tyrop'toydia" are fried cheese pies, made from the same crispy layer dough and stuffed with fresh cheese which you’ll taste hot, straight from the pan. On the island they call them f'lachtoydia or mpochtsadelia, because the square shape is reminiscent of the mpochtsa i.e. the white headscarf that Lemnian women farmers used to tie on their head in order to be protected in the fields by the wind and sun.
Lemnian tsipouro and ouzo seeks for accompaniment a good meze (snack)!
Seafood - consists of steamed mussels, octopus in vinegar, shellfishes and ark shells from Limnos’ seabed. Special and scarce snack are the baked limpets since they should be gathered one by one from the rocks of the seashore and cleaned thoroughly before getting into the saucepan, pour wine, cook with parsley and tomato in accordance to old fishermen’s recipe.
Pickles – consist of cucumber, aubergine, olives in vinegar and sea fennel collected from Limnos’ shores.
Cured fish – consist of sardines, mackerel, anchovies and lacerda cured in salt traditionally by the local industries of the island.
Kavourmas – is a lean cut of pork boiled in fat with salt. The selection for meat-eaters. You can eat it plain, but also it is worth tasting it in an omelette with farm eggs.
Cheese-an excellent appetizer for raki is the kalathaki Limnos along with garlic and green beans, also melichloro sachanaki cheese in pan gives a unique taste
Finally, afkos, the local split peas, delicious and aromatic, mashed through millstones, is served with olive oil and chopped onion.
Ladera and cooked meals
(Dish from the category "ladera", which means vegetables cooked in different ways with the addition of olive oil.)
The usage of "pots" in the Aegean is substantial, and the Lemnian housewives have adapted the casserole and cooked dishes of their kitchen in the cycle of the seasons, were based on materials from the orchard and the field, they incorporated masterfully in their recipes, influences from the refugees of Asia minor and the Lemnian emigrants in Egypt, creating dishes simple but small masterpieces of culinary art with beans, the broad beans or vine leaves. Authentic flavors that you can nowadays taste in the restaurants and the taverns of Limnos.
Try stuffed vine leaves made out of tender vine leaves gathered from the famous vineyards of Limnos, stuffed with rice and herbs. The locals tend to accompany it with sheep’s yogurt, but offering the same pleasure they can be eaten plain. You’ll definitely order a "pseftopet'no"(rooster) ie aubergines, cooked in oil with tomatoes, which are replacing the "pet'no" (rooster) to the known local dish and served with tasty local noodles, the flomaria. In the summer taste okra and green beans cooked in the saucepan with onions and fresh tomato, fresh broad beans in spring and stewed cauliflower in winter.
The cooked dishes with local vegetables in Limnos, influenced by the Asia Minor cuisine, stand out for their taste and the art of preparation: aubergines imam baildi, zucczucchini tourlou or briam stuffed tomatoes and peppers and courgette flowers stuffed with rice and herbs.
Fish and Seafood
Limnos is a great fishing place and local fishermen, craftsmen in net fishing, will bring on your plate fresh fish and seafood. Before dawn, the sea around Limnos is filled with illuminated fishing boats that look like stars in the sky. In days of dead calm the fishing trawlers are going out from the Venetian port of Myrina, directing to Tigani, near Ai-Stratis casting nets for silversides, whitebaits, red mullets, sea bream, swordfish, groupers, whatever the catch of the day would be.
A similar procedure is followed, by the fishermen in Moudros towards several fishing places on the island, with the company of seagulls and dolphins.
If you happen to arrive early in the morning at the port of Myrina, approach the trawlers that have just returned and take a look at the fresh catch.
Fish and seafood, from the fisherman’s nets and scale, will be routed fast to the taverns of Limnos. And from there, in your dish, cooked in many different ways and old fisherman recipes in the pan, into the pot, in the oven or on the grill.
Smaller fish such as anchovy, sardines, silversides, are in a-plenty during the summer and are served mostly fried, but also cooked with tomatoes and onions in the oven. Bigger fish are grilled and served with raw olive oil, lemon and parsley.
Try soups with a sea flavor, the classical fish soup of Limnos with rice and egg-lemon, characterized by the aroma which the mullet and the grouper give, as well as the fish soup with trachana an influence coming from Asia Minor. Definitely try the rice with mussels or shrimp, grilled sardines with lemon and olive oil, quid stuffed with rice, almonds, raisins and cooked in the pot, braised cuttlefish, lobster or crab cooked with mountain herbs or spinach, cod or red porgy in the oven with potatoes, stewed octopus.
Lemnian fish are perfectly accompanied with the excellent white muscat wine. With its fruity fragrance in a floral background, matches with the blackspot seabream, the breams, octopus, and lobsters caught on the island as well as with the exquisite cultivated mussels from New Koutali.
Meat and Hunting
"Pet'nos with Flomaria”, ie free range rooster braised with the local noodles, is a serious reason to make the long journey by boat or plane to get to Limnos, if you are a fan of gastronomic tourism!
Roosters and chicken still free-range today, as foxes do not exist on the island, lambs and goats with their tasty meat from the salty sea and the herbs of the Lemnian land, have always been the raw material of the meat eaters on the island, and moreover pork, that the old householders were feeding in their paddock for slaughtering the day after Christmas.
As the time went by, Limnos’ cuisine gained variety, but the long-established flavors never lost their value. In restaurants and taverns in Limnos taste meat, cooked in a traditional way, along with fresh seasonal vegetable, exquisite pasta and locally produced cheese.
A classic Sunday meal in a Lemnian house, which you must definitely try, is the lamb or goat in the oven with potatoes. The lamb with olive oil, oregano and lemon, with an exquisite aroma, is simmering in the pot with oregano. If you want to make a picnic, leave meatballs aside, and follow the lemnian suggestion for a picnic snack, cold but delicious slices of leg of lamb baked in parchment paper with its juices.
Lamb fricassee is a spring dish that you must not miss if you find yourself at this time of year on the island, where meat boils and gets a unique flavor from aromatic wild herbs and kafkalithres.
At Easter, have in mind kaspak'no, one of the epic dishes of the island along with the rooster with Flomaria. This is the meal of Easter for the residents of Kaspakas, lamb or goat in the oven with rice and a fresh head of cheese melted on top, true deli! In Limnos, the traditional recipe for Easter food is not lamb on the spit but lamb or goat stuffed with chopped haslets, fresh cheese, rice and aromatic herbs, baked in the oven.
If you visit the island during Christmas, forget the stuffed turkey and look for the traditional dish cooked this time of year in most houses, the island's pork selinato, ie local pork with celery egg-lemon.
Limnos is a paradise for hunters as in recent years the population of the wild rabbit in particular has increased significantly.
The wild rabbit stew is a special dish, cooked with onions or tomatoes with various spices, as well as in the oven or fried. It could be accompanied with fries, rice or flomaria. During the hunting period, you might taste woodcock cooked with tomatoes or lemon.
Sweet lovers will not know what to choose among the enormous variety of traditional sweets of Limnos, such as bonbons, that Venizelos tasted with enthusiasm, syrup sweets in a cooking sheet or sweet preserves.
Try samsades, sweet of the New Year's Eve, which nowadays can be found in bakeries on the island throughout the year. It is layer from dough wrapped in sesame seeds or threshed almond, blanched with honey.
Sweet preserves have always been traditional to treat, made from all the seasonal fruit of the island, and first of all from sour cherries, quince, grapes and Ornos (wild fig). Nowadays there are small handcraft shops, producing excellent sweet preserves.
Seek for Venizelika, sweets with almond and white vanilla glazing dedicated to Eleftherios Venizelos and taste Lemnian macaroons based on the almond, which in local tradition, were being offered to engagements and weddings.
Keep your mind on, for seasonal sweets, foinikia at Christmas, a Lemnian version of honey macaroon and milk pie, a baking sheet dessert without syrup which is traditionally made on the island on Halloween and afterwards, especially on the "Galatopeft" the Ascension Day.
Irresistible are also the syrupy sweets of the island, galaktoboureko (milkpie) with almonds, baked halva, baklava cut into a rose pattern, saragli with grated walnuts, and fifes with almonds and cinnamon clove.