Eliopita

Olive breads are scattered across the Aegean wherever olives are pressed, the dough a way to put up the cured fruit and the oil at once; the same dish is closely shared with Cyprus, where it is equally a household staple. The Greek-island version typically keeps to olives, onion and mint and is often a fast baking-powder loaf. The Cypriot eliopita is the better-documented relative, traditionally a yeasted or phyllo pie whose dough is mixed with orange juice and which leans on wrinkled throuba olives and spring onion. Both are home cooking with no single fixed recipe.

Dense and moist, heavy with oil, the crumb tinged grey-green where the olive flesh bled into it. Salt-cured olive hits first — briny, slightly bitter — cut by the cool lift of mint and the sweetness of softened onion. The crust is thin and chewy. It eats almost like a savory cake, satisfying at room temperature, and only gets better the second day as the flavors settle in.

Olives must be pitted, roughly chopped and patted dry — their cure carries a lot of salt and brine, so the dough itself needs little added salt, and wet olives would make the crumb gummy. Because so much olive oil goes in, the bread reads tender and almost cakey rather than crusty, the fat shortening the gluten. The onion is usually softened in oil first to take off its raw edge and sweeten it; the mint goes in raw so its volatile oils survive the bake and read fresh in the finished loaf.