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Greek bread is her New Year’s tradition
By CATHY DYSON
Lisa Summers says it doesn’t feel like the new year unless she’s got flour down the front of her—and all over the kitchen of her Ferry Farm home.
Summers is Greek, and during the last week of December, she makes a traditional New Year’s bread called Vasilopita.
She doesn’t just mix a batch for herself, husband John and their two sons, Daniel and Fred.
For this family tradition, she buys yeast by the pound, not the packet, and flour in bags big enough for restaurants.
“It’s a lot of work,” she said, “but it wouldn’t feel like New Year’s if I didn’t do it.”
A DIME FOR GOOD LUCK
Summers bakes 60 loaves of what’s also known as St. Basil’s Bread. He was a fourth-century bishop who gave loaves of sweet bread to the needy.
Each loaf contained a gold coin.
Summers uses dimes instead. She wraps them in foil because unwrapped ones turn the bread green.
Whoever finds the dime in a slice—and doesn’t lose or spend it—is said to have extra good luck for the year, Summers said.
She’s collected a jar of dimes over time. She can’t vouch for the extra fortune, but her father, George Fiackos, tells her to just think of what life would have been like without the good fortune that came with each dime.
Fiackos lives in St. Mary’s City, Md., and has baked New Year’s bread for 48 years, as his parents—Summers’ “YiaYia and Papou”—did before him. Two of his three children do the same.
“I’m still trying to get mine as good as Dad’s,” Summers said. “But that’ll never happen. He’s the master.”
She certainly gets enough practice. Her father won’t allow her to divulge the exact recipe, but she said 60 loaves require about 40 pounds of flour and 10 pounds of sugar, four dozen eggs, four pounds of butter and two pounds of Crisco.
She also adds a splash of Ouzo, a Greek liquor that smells like licorice, and mastiha, a Greek flavoring known as the original chewing gum.
When Fiackos first passed along the recipe, he included a jar of mastiha pebbles and instructions to grind them into powder.
Summers spent 45 minutes trying to smash the stuff, but still ended up with more chunks than granules. She called her dad and asked how in the world he did it.
“Just add a tablespoon of sugar,” he said, as if every Greek knew that from birth.
13th YEAR OF BAKING
Summers started the process by melting butter and shortening on the stove and adding sugar. Then, she combined all the wet ingredients into a large rectangular loaf pan.
She reached for a 20-pound bag of flour and started pouring.
This is her 13th year of bread-making, so she knew just how much to add.
She kneaded and squeezed, flipped and flopped the mixture in her hands until it looked like usable dough. Summers knew it was right when she stuck her finger into a mound and it came out clean.
She put the divided dough into large pans, covered them with garbage bags and let the yeast do its work. Every four hours throughout the night, she punched the dough to make it rise even more.
The next morning, as 3-year-old Daniel and 9-month-old Fred played at her feet, the mother divided the dough into one-pound blobs. She let her KitchenAid mixer knead it a little more, dropped in a wrapped coin and rolled the dough into an oval shape.
Atop each loaf, she arranged a “12,” shaping the dough the same way kids roll Play–Doh between their hands to form a snake.
She brushed a mixture of egg and water over each loaf, sprinkled sesame seeds, and let the mounds rise another 30 minutes.
Then, she baked them, two on each sheet, two sheets in the oven at a time.
And so on, until she had enough loaves for friends in Texas and family in Florida, neighbors in Stafford and fellow church members of Falmouth Baptist Church.
BLESSINGS AND MEMORIES
By the third day of the process, Summers felt the usual soreness that comes with handling 60 loaves of bread.
She knew she would be rewarded in other ways.
She felt great sharing the Vasilopita—and her family’s wishes for a year filled with blessings and happy memories.
“And the best part is, the house smells like bread for almost a week,” she said.
Cathy Dyson: 540/374-5425
[email protected]
ABOUT THE BREAD
ANNUAL TREAT: As much as Lisa Summers loves the Greek New Year’s bread, she bakes it only once a year. “I love it too much and it’s not on my Weight Watchers plan,” she said.
BUTTER, PLEASE: Some like the bread toasted and others, dipped into coffee, but she likes to eat it with butter and accompanied by a big glass of orange juice.
NO EXTRAS: One year, Summers got to the baking point and realized she was missing a nail tip. She’d had a manicure earlier that week, and one of the fingernail extensions came off in the batter. She threw everything away and started all over again.
Bread Making with Bill & Sheila
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