Mastiha
Yiorgos Rikaniadis “embroiders” mastiha trees near the village of Mesta in southern Chios. Diana Farr Louis
Mastiha
The Distinctive Aroma of Mastic
The lentisk is a tough little evergreen tree, not much to look at. It grows no more than about three meters (ten feet) tall and has small, dark green leaves gathered in clusters; its trunk and branches are scaly and sinewy, twisted like rope. Pistacia lentiscus, a member of the same family as the pistachio, thrives in stony, infertile soil, along with thistles and hardy scrub like thyme, Jerusalem sage, and juniper. It’s so prevalent in Greece that it’s considered a nuisance. From my terrace on Cycladic Andros, I can see dozens of the plants — sprawling blots on the tawny hillside. Some even encroach on our olive trees or send seedlings into the cracks in our paths. But on Chios, the northern Aegean island that lies just eight nautical miles from the coast of Turkey, the trees behave quite differently.
They look just the same as the lentisks elsewhere, but they are different enough to merit a separate botanical name: P. lentiscus var. chia. And they possess a unique feature. When cut, they weep — tears of clear resin that have an enticing aroma as well as long-proven antiseptic properties that will heal a wound. The tears dry and harden into crystals — mastic — that are collected, cleaned, and sold at a premium. In southern Chios, there may be as many as two million mastic trees, growing not in vast groves like olives, but in neat rows, some with no more than ten or 20 trees, along roadsides, on flat land, up gentle hills — just about everywhere you look. These trees and the mastic they produce are worth a small fortune.
Mastic lends its distinctive aroma to all sorts of dishes as well as spirits in the Eastern Mediterranean and Arab world. Considered a spice, its gummy consistency and therapeutic properties have made it an ingredient in products as disparate as adhesives, toothpaste, dyspepsia cures, and finishing varnish for oil paintings. In Greece, mastiha — as its gastronomic advocates prefer to call it, to avoid unappetizing nonculinary associations — has long been added to festive breads, creamy puddings, and sticky sweets, such as Turkish delight (known in Greek as loukoumi). During the past decade or so, more and more chefs have been experimenting with adding it to savory sauces for meat, poultry, and especially seafood, finding that it enhances tomato and lemon, yogurt and béchamel, not to mention chocolate. Mastiha liqueur has become a favorite digestif at Athenian restaurants.
In certain places, mastiha has never gone out of fashion. Indeed, throughout its long history it has been such a valuable commodity that people have killed and died for control of the mastic trade. It was a chief ingredient in poultices, tisanes, cordials, and other folk remedies for just about any ailment. And it was widely popular as chewing gum; from Nero’s court to a Sultan’s harem, mastic kept the breath sweet and the mouth healthy. The practice of chewing it gave us the word “masticate.”
In recent years the folk remedies of the past have been validated by modern science. The research department of the Chios Gum Mastic Growers Association works with about a dozen universities in Greece and abroad on medical applications; countless studies have confirmed an array of health benefits.
Over the centuries, speculators have tried to cultivate the trees elsewhere and to harvest resin from other lentisks, without success. Some scholars maintain that when Christopher Columbus embarked on his great voyage, he was actually hoping to find a new source of mastiha. He had served as a sea captain on Chios when the island was controlled by a Genoese cartel and knew how profitable the spice was. Though he wrote that he had discovered mastic trees in the Caribbean, they were just deceptive relatives. The lentisks that grow outside Chios do emit resin, but the quantity is invariably limited and the quality unmarketable — the resin neither possesses the same aroma nor hardens properly. Although no one has isolated the exact chemistry, it seems that in southern Chios soil and dry climate come together in a way that cannot be duplicated. In the northern half of the island, as in the rest of the Mediterranean, the mastiha trees remain uncultivated.
To those inimitable climate and soil characteristics, add the human factor — the agricultural expertise, knowledge, and respect with which generations of growers have looked after their trees. On Chios, mastiha producers take resin from only the male trees, and when they propagate new trees, they take cuttings from the strongest. It is just possible that today’s trees are genetically identical to those that produced mastic 2,000 years ago.
For the last 700 years most mastiha producers have lived close to their trees in the 24 so-called mastihohoria, or mastic villages, of southern Chios. All are medieval walled settlements built by the Genoese, who ruled Chios from 1346 to 1566, to protect the mastic from pirate raids. Pyrgi, the largest, with a population of 1,000, is named for the now crumbling fortified tower or pyrgos in its center. It has all the features you would expect — massive doors, dark mazelike alleys to confuse intruders, some vaulted or joined by arches — and some you would not: AC units, parked motorbikes, and extravagant black and white patterns in the shapes of half-moons, animals, flowers, triangles, stars, rosettes, crosses, that cover almost every visible surface and are unique to this village.
When I visited Pyrgi in August 2011, the first collection of mastic was drying inside. Outside every doorway, for want of courtyards, sat clusters of men and women of all ages on plastic chairs, gossiping loudly or kibitzing over a backgammon board. In the afternoon, during the siesta, the streets were deserted except for the almost tangible scent of mastiha. It resembles no other: fragrant, piney, and musky at the same time, slightly sweet, delicate yet pronounced.
I spent the morning in the mastiha fields learning about production. My guide, Vassilis Ballas, who sports a ponytail, left a well-paid computer job in Athens to work with mastiha near his grandparents’ village of Mesta — population 300. He drove me over rutted roads to a scruffy slope where since sunup his best friend Nikos Rikaniadis and Nikos’s father, Yiorgos, had been slashing mastiha trees.
Mastic tears drip from the scarred bark. Diana Farr Louis
The trees were lined up about six feet apart on low terraces; around each one the ground had been transformed into an immaculate white circle. It’s so hard, flat, and smooth that the Chiots call it a trapezi, or “table.” “That’s powdered calcium carbonate,” said Vassilis. “The local name is asprohoma, or white earth. In late spring we scrape the area around the trees to remove the weeds and leaves. Then we throw handfuls of the powder to cover the soil. This is where the mastic tears will fall. If they are discolored by contact with the brown earth, they’ll be worthless.”
Until recently, all the weeding and sweeping were done with a sharp hoe and a whisk broom. Now some farmers resort to weed whackers and leaf blowers. Their ancestors had to travel by donkey to extract the calcium carbonate from a special quarry some distance away, and then grind it to a fine powder by hand in a giant mortar. Today they buy it ready for use. But the most important aspects of mastiha production — incising the trees and collecting the tears — have hardly changed in a thousand years.
I watched Yiorgos “embroider” the trees. Armed with a sharp, double-pointed tool and wearing knee pads, he quickly, surely, and precisely added new incisions to the already scarred bark. Spaced about eight to nine millimeters apart, each gash was about ten to fifteen millimeters long, two to three wide, four to five deep. Strange that this aggressive act should have such a refined name in Greek: kentima, “embroidery,” is usually associated with genteel ladies sitting in parlors with their needles, threads, and dainty fabrics.
Yiorgos spent 35 years working in restaurants in New York City. Now retired to an Athens suburb, he comes to his native Chios every summer to help his son in the mastiha fields. “I’ve worked all my life. I can’t stop now. I started with mastiha at the age of eight, during the war. Those were hard times, but my grandfather would get me out of bed at 5 and slap me if I dawdled. You don’t see kids doing these jobs anymore.”
Nikos and Vassilis are anomalies in the world of mastiha growers; few are under 60. But when I asked if mastiha farming would survive the modern age, no one even considered the possibility that it would not. As one grower said, “These trees are like our children, there will always be people to look after them. “Another added, “You’ll see, with this crisis even teenagers will be leaving their computers and helping out.” Mastiha remains a family business. As Nikos Rikaniadis said, “You’d have to have 3,000 trees to justify hiring workers, and in any case most owners prefer to themselves perform the delicate job of cutting.”
Olimbi is one of the mastiha villages founded by the Genoese in the 14th century. Diana Farr Louis
Wearing long sleeves, thick gloves, and a tasseled white scarf on his head to keep from getting sticky, Yiorgos stooped down and slashed some more. “We begin at the base of the tree and move up gradually, don’t make too many cuts at first. We visit each tree every six days or so. Some trees can take as many as 200 cuts, others as few as 50. You want to see how it reacts,” he explained. “Look, see how it starts to sweat as soon as I cut it? But you need to be careful — don’t want to scare the tree.”
Later, Vassilis told me about an experiment that was made to speed up collection by making all the cuts at the same time instead of spreading them out from early July to late August. The experiment traumatized trees and they withered in shock.
Properly treated, a mastiha tree may live more than 100 years. Its productive life begins around the age of five or six and continues up to 70, when the weeping becomes less copious. The average yield per tree is 150 to 200 grams (five to seven ounces); in 2010, from 2,000 trees Nikos collected 130 kilos, which fetched about 76 euros (just under 100 dollars) per kilo when he delivered them to the Chios Gum Mastic Growers Association. With the addition of a couple of very small subsidies (1.30 euros for each tree declared and a free bucket of asprohoma for every 2. kilos) plus tax rebates, he earned a total of 10,000 euros. Not a huge income for so much work, but at least it is guaranteed.
The association buys all the mastiha collected, whether it can be sold or not. In 2010, the harvest came to 150 tons, and, when I visited, 30 tons remained in its storerooms. With the highest-quality crystals wholesaling at about 95 euros per kilo, the association doesn’t have a big profit margin, but they did bring 12 million euros to growers, made up of between 3,000 and 5,000 households, a variable number because not every family is active every year. Most grow mastiha for additional income.
Every grower is legally required to turn over his crop to one of 20 local cooperatives. These obligatory cooperatives then deliver the crop to the association for processing and promotion. In exchange, the grower receives his money up front, while the association admits to turning a blind eye if a portion of the crop should go astray and be sold unofficially. While some growers may prefer to sell direct to distillers or other manufacturers, most are happy to leave sales, both domestic and international, to the association’s executives.
Before the mastiha can be taken to the association’s factory, it must be cleaned; the hardest job, it naturally falls to the women. After the harvest, virtually all the older women in Pyrgi and the other villages sit on their stoops with pans of unsorted mastiha crystals in their laps. From the mess of leaves, twigs, soil, they pick out the hardened “tears,” which range in size from about as big as a fingernail to tiny beads no larger than the head of a pin.
Mastiha trees grow in typical rows on a hillside near Olimbi. Diana Farr Louis
Not all the crystals are of the same quality. The largish flat pieces, called pites, or “pies,” gathered during the first collection in mid-August, are not really crystals, being more aromatic and softer, and are used in distilling mastiha liqueurs. At the end of the harvest, before the first autumn rain, the men scrape from the tree any droplets that haven’t fallen to the ground. Some of them are yellow and opaque, left over from the previous year, and must be separated from the clear pixari, as the best mastiha is called. After the women sieve and sort the crystals, they wash them repeatedly in cold water. The crystals rise to the surface and are easily skimmed off. But even the leaves and twigs are washed, for mastiha dust may be clinging to them. Nothing is wasted.
Time-consuming and tedious, cleaning at home can take months. In the old days, it would be a community effort. Girls would join their aunts and grandmothers, who would sing songs and tell stories, passing on their heritage. Nowadays, when it’s too cold for the elders to sit outside gossiping, they move indoors to watch their favorite soaps — without the younger generation — until every household’s storeroom has been emptied.
The time spent between harvest and arrival at the factory is short. Mastiha tends to oxidize slowly, and if left a year or more at room temperature, it can become yellow and bitter.
Upon delivery to the factory, the crystals are put into massive refrigerators, where they remain at 8 degrees C until they are processed. Every day a portion of the mastic is distributed among 24 women to clean it further; they sit under fluorescent lights, four to a glaring white table. Each woman has her own mound of mastiha crystals to whittle at with a sharp knife, removing infinitesimal specks of grit. They are paid by the kilo, and an expert can clean from five to ten kilos of mastiha a day, earning as much as 70 euros, well above the average Greek daily wage of 50 euros for unskilled labor.
Opposite the cold storage is the laundry, where all the mastiha is washed in ice water. The smaller crystals are then soaked for 24 hours before being poured into a huge vat containing water and glycerol. There the clean particles float to the surface, enabling workers to scoop them out and put them in an adjacent air dryer for an hour. Until the installation of this machinery ten years ago, they were laid out on linen sheets to dry naturally. Once dry, the crystals are mechanically inspected for impurities before packaging. Those that don’t make the grade for medical or culinary uses can be sold as incense.
Elias Smirnioudis, who showed me the factory, told me that 20 percent of the harvest goes to chewing gum and essential oil, used in cosmetics. Sixty percent is exported, mostly to the Arab world but also to the US, for Mastisol liquid adhesive. Twenty percent of the total crop remains in Greece, where it is enormously popular as a flavoring in briochelike breads, ice creams, and sweets. But no Chiot woman would dream of cooking with mastic. When I once asked a pair who were cleaning it, they cried in unison, “Po po po!” — Absolutely not! — “We do chew it but never add it to our food.”
During my first three decades of living in Greece, I was barely aware of mastiha’s existence. I knew it only as a “submarine” — a spoonful of semi-solid white sweet sucked by children and dunked in a water glass — and as an unusual ice cream flavor.
Yet today, just a few kilometers away from the main plant is another factory devoted to finding new recipes for mastiha and making products that will appeal to new customers. In 2002, Giannis Mandalas, a 30-something native of Chios, had an idea that would change the image of mastiha from a curious spice with limited culinary use to a kitchen staple. When I first met him in 1999, he was working for the regional government on development possibilities that would promote the island’s traditions without clashing with its environment.
He founded the company, with the association as the majority owner, “to promote mastiha awareness and give it an identity.” He explained, “We called it Mediterra to convey the Mediterranean connection; mastiha’s history stretches way beyond Greece.”
The fruit and vegetable vendor stops in Pyrgi’s main square. Geometric designs, called xysta (sgraffito),
unique to the village, cover almost every surface of every building. Diana Farr Louis
Mediterra has been extraordinarily successful. In 2000, the number of foods on the market containing mastiha was five. Now it is 500. Many are made by Mediterra and sold at its trademark mastihashops in Chios, Athens, and in airports all over Greece, as well as in Paris, New York City, and soon Saudi Arabia. The most popular food items are still in the sweet rather than savory range. But Mediterra’s R&D department is trying to establish both the amount of mastiha that will be acceptable to potential consumers and the percentage of the spice that should be added to a specific product. According to Antonis Kalitsis, production director at the factory, “When we think up a way of using mastiha in a traditional recipe, we hand it to a small company to experiment with. We pay for their costs. If it catches on, we can then give it to a larger firm. Take chocolate, for example. We dealt with a company in Lebanon that was already producing chocolate with mastiha. Now both of Greece’s biggest chocolate makers sell bitter chocolate with mastiha.”
Introducing mastiha into savory recipes requires even more thought and inspiration, because its flavor is so associated with sweets and has to be unobtrusive. Tomato sauces, spice rubs, and spreads with eggplant, red pepper, or olives are obvious contenders. As for cooking with mastiha at home, I recommend Diane Kochilas’s Mastiha Cuisine, published by Mediterra. Her dishes are simple, clear, and tempting. A judicious amount of the spice adds a subtle, or, as she has said, a seductive dimension to dishes such as Mastiha-Marinated Octopus and Roasted Red Peppers and Herbs; Sautéed Shrimp with Mastiha, Vegetables, and Feta; and Steak au Poivre with Mastiha Mystique. Piney, musky, it’s hard to describe because it’s unlike any spice most people are used to. Kochilas also gives instructions for infusing olive oil with mastiha and advice for pounding the crystals (adding a little salt or sugar prevents the powder from sticking). She warns against adding more than half a teaspoonful of powdered mastiha to any savory dish; a heavy hand can produce a bitter, astringent taste.
Since 1997, the EU has identified mastiha as a Protected Designation of Origin product, and the PDO seal, a blue circle ringed with gold, is a guarantee of quality. Adulterated imitations abound, and a bad experience will have you wondering what all the fuss was about. The best way to get acquainted with mastiha is by drinking it — Tetteris and Skinos are two reliable brands of liqueur.
There is something almost mystical about this ancient flavoring, as though eating or drinking it links us to all the peoples who have craved it over the centuries, as well as to the hardy villagers of southern Chios, who have toiled over the trees and their tears since time immemorial.●
From issue 89The post Mastiha appeared first on The Art of Eating Magazine.