Loukoumades: The Honeyed Dough Balls of Ancient Games

The claim you will see on every loukoumades stall in Athens is that these were the prize at the ancient Olympics — the honey tokens, handed to winners in the games. The claim is roughly half true and worth unpicking, because the half that is true is genuinely remarkable.

What is certain is that fried honey-soaked dough is very old in Greece and has barely changed. What follows is a version with a syrup that has had black pepper and thyme sitting in it, which sounds like a stunt and is the reason I now make them the way I make them.

The Olympic claim, examined

The word to look for is enkris (ἐγκρίς), and it appears in Greek texts from the fifth century BC onwards. Athenaeus, in the Deipnosophistae, quotes earlier writers describing enkrides as dough boiled in oil and afterwards dipped in honey. That is this dish. The technique, the medium and the finish are all present and there is nothing to add.

Where the popular story overreaches is the Olympic prize. The recorded prize at Olympia was the kotinos, a wreath of wild olive, and the athletes’ rewards were civic and financial rather than edible. There is a related fragment: the poet Callimachus, third century BC, mentions honey-cakes given to victors, and Greek scholarship has associated the charisios plakous — a honey cake — with victory celebrations. So the picture is of honey-fried dough eaten at and around the games rather than pressed into a champion’s hand on the podium. Still: the same batter, the same oil, the same honey, more or less continuously, for two and a half thousand years.

The name changed. Loukoumades comes into Greek via Arabic luqma, meaning a mouthful or a morsel — the same root that gives Turkish lokma and, along a different branch, lokum and therefore Turkish delight. The Arabic cookbook tradition has luqmat al-qadi, “the judge’s mouthfuls”, described in thirteenth-century Baghdad. Practically every eastern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern culture has this exact object under a different name, and they are all correct that theirs is the oldest, because it is older than all of them.

A batter loose enough to be unhandleable

This is the fork in the road. Recipes exist for a kneadable loukoumades dough, and they produce a heavy, bready thing closer to a doughnut. The correct texture is a hollow, shattering shell around a wisp of steam and crumb, and that comes from a batter so slack you cannot handle it — 320 ml of water to 250 g of flour is around 128 per cent hydration, which is wetter than any bread dough you have made.

What that hydration buys is steam. When a wet blob hits 175C oil, the water at its surface flashes to vapour and inflates the interior while the exterior sets, and the loukouma puffs into a near-hollow sphere. A stiff dough has less water to give and fries into something solid.

The cornflour is a modern insurance policy. Fifty grams in place of some plain flour lowers the total gluten, and less gluten means a crust that fractures rather than bends. It also stays crisp under the honey for a couple of minutes longer, which is the whole margin you get with this dish.

Whisk hard, once, at the start. After the rise, leave the batter alone. Every bubble you knock out of it is a bubble that will not be in the finished thing.

The wet spoon, and the shape

You cannot shape 128 per cent hydration batter with dry hands. The traditional Greek method is to squeeze the batter through a closed fist so a ball emerges between thumb and forefinger and to shear it off with a wet spoon. It works and it takes practice and it burns you.

The easier route, and the one above, is two vessels: a bowl of cold water and a teaspoon that goes into it before every scoop. Wet metal releases wet batter. Dry metal keeps it. This is the entire technique and it is why people’s first attempt at loukoumades produces amoebas.

They will be irregular. Good. Stall loukoumades in Athens are irregular; the perfectly spherical ones come out of a piped machine and taste like it.

Temperature, and why you need the thermometer

175C. This is one of the few places in home cooking where guessing costs you the dish outright.

At 160C the surface takes too long to set, oil migrates inward through the still-porous crust, and you get a greasy, sodden loukouma that weeps into the honey. At 190C the exterior browns and rigidifies in ninety seconds while the interior is still batter, and you bite into something with a raw wet middle. The window at 175C is wide enough to be forgiving and narrow enough to be worth measuring.

Six to eight at a time, no more. Each cold blob drops the oil temperature, and a crowded pan can lose 20C in seconds. Wait for the recovery between batches. This same discipline governs Icelandic twisted doughnuts and every other fried dough worth the oil.

The wire rack is non-negotiable. Kitchen paper traps steam against the base and the crust you fought for goes limp in forty seconds.

Thyme honey, black pepper, and salt

Greek thyme honey is dark, resinous and slightly bitter, and it comes from bees working Thymbra capitata on dry Aegean hillsides. It is the traditional honey here and it is worth seeking out; the alternative is any honey with a real character, and the one to avoid is the pale, mild blended stuff, which under 200 g of dilution tastes of nothing but sugar.

The pepper is my addition, and it sounds louder than it tastes. Half a teaspoon of cracked peppercorns infused into the warm syrup for half an hour contributes piperine, which registers at the back of the throat about two seconds after the sweetness, and stops 200 g of honey collapsing into monotony. Sweet-and-peppery is an old pairing — the Romans put pepper in almost every dessert Apicius records — and it works here for the reason it worked then, which is that honey needs an argument. The pinch of flaky salt at the end does adjacent work.

Fresh thyme in the syrup echoes the honey’s own provenance. It is a cheat that makes supermarket honey taste more like Greek honey.

The frying oil, and how long it lasts

Greeks fry loukoumades in olive oil, and I am going to talk you out of it for domestic purposes.

The objection is not the smoke point, which is a red herring — a decent refined olive oil sits around 200C and a good extra virgin around 190C, both comfortably above the 175C we need. The objection is what happens to the flavour. Olive oil’s phenolic compounds break down under sustained frying heat into aldehydes that taste rancid and bitter, and the effect builds across batches, so your last six loukoumades taste noticeably worse than your first six. Traditional Greek frying used cheap, low-grade olive oil precisely because it had fewer phenols to spoil.

Sunflower, groundnut or rapeseed oil is neutral, cheap and stable, and the honey is the flavour anyway. If you want the olive note, use a plain refined olive oil rather than an extra virgin.

A litre and a half sounds excessive for thirty-five small objects and it is the right amount. Depth is a thermal buffer: a large mass of oil loses less temperature when cold batter hits it, recovers faster, and therefore fries more evenly. A shallow pan with 500 ml will swing 25C every time you load it, and you will fight it all evening. The blobs also need to float and roll freely — a loukouma resting on the pan base develops a flat, dark, hard spot.

The oil is reusable. Cool it completely, strain it through a coffee filter or muslin into a clean bottle, and keep it dark. Frying oil is fine for three or four sessions and tells you when it is finished: it darkens, it foams around whatever you put in it, and it starts to smell of fish. Then it goes.

What they are in Greece now

The dish has had an odd second life. For most of the twentieth century loukoumades were a galaktopoleio item — the old milk-and-sweets shops that doubled as informal cafés, run by men in white coats, half of them Vlach or Epirot by origin, and slowly dying out through the 1980s as the country’s coffee culture changed.

Then, sometime in the 2000s, they came back as a street-food format. Athens now has shops doing nothing else, with the batter squeezed through a hopper and the balls fried in a rotating drum, and a menu of toppings that would appal a grandmother: Nutella, biscuit crumb, pistachio praline, ice cream. The purist position is that this is desecration. The honest position is that a hot loukouma with dark chocolate and crushed pistachio is superb, and that the dish has always been a vehicle for whatever sweetness was locally available — honey in antiquity because honey was what there was, sugar syrup in the Ottoman centuries, chocolate now.

They also carry a religious calendar. In many regions loukoumades are made for the feast of Saint Andrew on 30 November — in Patras especially, where Andrew is the patron saint — and on Epiphany. The Cypriot cousins, loukoumades by the same name but often made with a stiffer batter, appear at Christmas.

The thing worth defending is the texture, which is why the batter hydration and the oil temperature above are worth being fussy about. Toppings are negotiable. A hollow, crackling shell is the dish.

Faults, timings and variations

They are dense and heavy. Batter was too stiff, or the rise was short. It must dome and bubble.

They are greasy. Oil below 165C, or too many in at once.

They collapsed after saucing. Normal after ten minutes. Loukoumades are a stand-at-the-stove food, and there is no such thing as leftover ones. Fry, sauce, eat, in that order and quickly.

Make-ahead. The batter can rise slowly in the fridge for up to 12 hours and comes back to life in 45 minutes at room temperature. The syrup keeps a fortnight in a jar.

Variations. Sesame seeds instead of walnut is the Cypriot habit. A dip of melted chocolate is the modern Athenian one and is exactly as good as it sounds. For a nuttier, chewier cousin in the same family of syrup-drowned Greek sweets, see pistachio baklava, and for the honey-and-walnut register without the deep fryer, honey and ricotta phyllo cups with walnuts.