Bring Greece To Your Table With A Traditional Mediterranean Breakfast

The Greeks have a saying: "A good day starts from the morning." And, probably not coincidentally, breakfast has a special place in traditional Greek culture. It can include a wide array of foods and flavors, from savory to sweet. While you may be familiar with some Greek breakfast staples, such as the country's well-known yogurt (drizzled with honey), you may not be acquainted with others, like the very popular koulouri Thessalonikis, a flatbread ring covered in sesame seeds, or loukoumades, the forerunners of today's more popular donuts. These small fried dough balls are drizzled in honey and dusted in cinnamon and in some cases covered with bits of nuts.

Traditional Greek breakfast foods range from omelettes (omeleta) to tiropita, a savory cheese pie with phyllo dough, along with fresh fruit, cheese, and bread. The meal is always washed down with Greek coffee, which is slowly brewed in a unique pot, giving it a rich flavor and creamy texture. What you won't find with Greek breakfasts is a lot of meat. Sorry, bacon lovers, but even at breakfast the Greeks tend to maintain the regional Mediterranean diet, with its reliance on healthy fats, lots of fruits and vegetables, and a focus on fresh, local, and seasonal ingredients. While you may not have the energy in the morning to bake koulouri, there are a variety of Greek breakfast dishes that are fairly easy to make.

If you want to incorporate a Greek-style breakfast into your morning routine, perhaps the most obvious place to start is with Greek yogurt drizzled with honey and topped with walnuts. There's also omeleta, which is fairly easy to make since, unlike French omelettes, this version incorporates the additions — feta cheese, fresh tomatoes, kalamata olives, and veggies like zucchini — straight into the eggs. An even simpler version is strapatsada, which is scrambled eggs with feta and tomatoes.

For a healthy and super easy Greek-style morning meal, try the "grandma breakfast," which is a slice of bread with butter and honey, a boiled egg, and fresh-squeezed orange juice. If you're looking for something sweet, making loukoumades from scratch is fun and fairly easy. There are a ton of recipes online on just how to do it. For a weekend breakfast, home-made tiropita  — one of the staple pie flavors of ancient Greece —  can be made in about an hour using store-bought phyllo dough. The deeper you dive into the Greek breakfast scene, the more ideas you'll find to make your own morning Mediterranean meal.