My love affair with paximadia did not begin until I had lived in Greece for 25 years. In all that time I had never encountered the thick, rock-hard, twice-baked hunk of whole-grain bread that goes by that name. Then in 1997, when I started to visit Crete to find recipes and stories for a book, I discovered ingredients and dishes unknown on the mainland: fresh white cheeses, dozens of greens, raisin-stuffed sweets, ravioli-sized savory pies, “sour” trahana (a kind of crumbly pasta), snails with rosemary, fish with spiny artichokes. I tasted wedding pilaf made with the broth of 17 chickens or several yearling lambs, and, at last, paximadia, in an astonishing range of shapes and flavors.
My first paximadi (that’s the singular) appeared on a Heraklio menu under the namedakos, and the waiter described it as a kind of dog biscuit. Dakos, or takos, comes from a word meaning “shim,” that piece of wood wedged under a table to stop it wobbling. This undoubtedly is a play on the texture of paximadia, which might just as well have been dubbed petra, or stone. Shaped like a saucer and as big, it was barely visible under a mound of chopped tomato and myzithra cheese (similar to ricotta but with a tang), sprinkled with olive oil and oregano. The paximadi, or rusk, saturated with tomato juice and oil, had softened but was still crunchy, and its nutty flavor added a new dimension to the acidic tomatoes, creamy cheese, and fruity oil. I savored every mouthful.
