Opa! Saganaki Trials.

I’m not sure how the rest of you are, but when I frequent the same restaurant often, I tend to pick a favorite menu item and order it every time. This has never been truer than at my favorite restaurant, Papapavlos. I can’t say with 100% certainty, but for the most part I’ve ordered the same thing for about the last 15 years. The centerpiece of my meal is the appetizer, Saganaki, also known as flaming cheese. For years I’ve wanted to try to make Saganaki at home. Today I finally followed through with that wish. Tonight was just a test run for the big show tomorrow. Dawn and I are celebrating the start of our blog by inviting some of our best friends over for dinner. I’ve been talking about making Saganaki for years now and finally have an occasion fitting of such an exciting dish, but with all the hype I needed to be sure I can deliver a good product.

After my first trial, I’m glad I decided to conduct a test run before tomorrow. The Saganaki flavor was just about there, but it surely didn’t look like the Saganaki from Papapavlos. I put too much butter in the pan, had the heat too high, didn’t get the cheese uniformly melted and I didn’t really have the right spatula available. All that said, when we lit the Ouzo, the flame was big, fun, and looked like it was supposed to.

As I stated previously I’ve been contemplating this recipe for quite some time now. I’ve scoured the internet for any recipe I could find to see other peoples interpretations. From the best I can tell, the most traditional method is to use kefalotiri or kefalograviera cheese, but when those are unavailable or too pricy, kasseri cheese does just fine. Both Papapavlos and I used Kesseri. I chose to fry the cheese in butter and chose the more tradition use of Ouzo to create the spectacular flame so synonymous with Saganaki. I tried to keep my recipe as close to the one I’ve grown up on from Papapavlos as I could. Hopefully I’ll be able to shore up a few of the deficiencies I experienced tonight before our big dinner tomorrow.

I hope you will all check in tomorrow to see how my Saganaki turns out and what else we prepare for our kick-off dinner.

Aric