Karpathos charms with its beautiful beaches and flavorful cuisine that features dishes like byzanti—lamb or goat filled with rice, entrails, raisins, pine nuts, aromatic herbs and spices which is then cooked in a wood-burning oven.
The dish traditionally served at weddings is hondros, or coarse wheat with meat. Hondros can be boiled in milk, for a creamy texture, or in water and then covered with browned onion and cheese just before serving.
The oddly-shaped hand-rolled pasta known as makarounes is particularly taste. They’re made from a long piece of dough cut into three-centimeter pieces which are pressed firmly with the fingers to form a recess in the center, then left to dry. The makarounes are then boiled and covered with browned onions and sprinkled with cheese. Psomomakarona, bite-sized pieces of stale bread that are boiled in salted water for a couple of minutes, are also served this way.
For a sweet tooth, try sousamomelo (sesame-honey) the traditional wedding treat. The fine local honey is also drizzled on kserotigana (fried dough strips), loukoumades (fried dough puffs), and tiganites (pancakes made with a dough-like batter) as well as baklava and alevria (dough rings with honey and butter).
Psilokoulouro, a type of bread ring, is more of a work of art than food. It is a large, round ring of bread in whose center twelve strips of dough are placed in a thatched design and the whole thing is dusted with sugared sesame seeds before baking. The famed Karpathos cakes are triangular pies with a filling of mizithra cheese, sugar, and nutmeg. Another sweet is zebilia, small crescent-shaped pies with a raisin and nutmeg filling that are dusted with white and black sesame seeds before baking.
