Keeping with Tradition

Petros Economakos followed the family tradition of becoming a butcher, but used the experience to open a small cured meats business. Vassilis Vaimakis turned his oenologist training to utilizing a wine byproduct, vinegar. Niki Mitarea spoke with these enterprising Greeks who have found success through Greek food traditions.

The Sausage Link
The sausage sizzles on the barbecue; the smell and sound of it cooking hint at its flavor, a temptation few can resist.
“I come from a family of butchers who have honed their art since the days of the Ottoman empire. My grandfather founded the butchers’ association and I followed in the family footsteps,” says Petros Economakos, a jovial man who believes in adhering to tradition. And he manages just that with his business that  makes sausages and cured meats according to traditional sausage recipes of the southern Peloponnese.
The idea for the business started simply enough. Having run out of excuses not to bring home the sausages his wife would occasionally demand as he didn’t trust their quality, he decided to make his own–a process he had watched since childhood and a skill he had known for years. The only thing missing was the recipe, which he asked his father to hand down.
“He tried to discourage me, telling me it’s very fussy. But I insisted.”
That was in 1975. Economakos learned the secret spice mix, experimented with other flavors, and started producing small batches of sausages by hand for his butcher shop. “Over time, I adapted the old recipes to current needs and now use less salt.”
These few sausages were the beginnings of what has become a successful family business. “In 1995, I left the butcher shop and opened the small sausage plant in the center of Kalamata. My wife was always at my side and now my sons, Yorgos and Panayotis, are too.
The sausage plant uses the same traditional methods for making sausages that Economakos learned from his father. Traditional methods are also used to make other cured meats (pasto) like siglino, the smoked pork from Mani. “We use raw Greek pork which I buy from regular suppliers. I make the sausage with lean meat from which the nerves have been removed, like bon filet. The intestine is natural. The siglino is cured with salt: we don’t use any preservatives. Mani has a long tradition of salt curing. It’s smoked using olive and Kermes oak wood and flavored with aromatic herbs like sage and mastic picked on Taygetos’s slopes so the meat has the flavor of the mountains.”
Biting into a sausage you can taste the flavors of these wild mountain herbs–non-mastiha producing species of the mastic bush or lentisk, schinos in Greek, grow around the country–mingle with the taste of orange rind and spices. “I use just the right amount of spices and cut the meat into large bites. I get quite a few English and French tourists in my shop and when they try the sausage or the pasto and they murmur with pleasure. I have fanatic customers–and that gives me joy and encouragement.”
For now, Economakos’s products can only be bought in Greece. He’s been approached to export his products to Cyprus and Germany but he has declined because he doesn’t have the production capacity. “I make about 100 tons of sausages a year/ I have one oven where I smoke them now, but plan to build an infrastructure of between three and five ovens so I can expand production to new products like traditional soutzoukaki and pikhti.”
Economakos is a firm supporter of following tradition in culinary matters. The combination of using traditional methods of food preparation and maintaining high standards of quality are the ways to succeed–and to grow. “We get school visits and I always advise young people to stick with tradition,” he says, blaming parents who pushed their children into the public sector for Greece’s current economic woes. “People who struggle to remain true to tradition deserve our support because it’s their faith that preserves local culture and history.”

Off the wine
In the early 1980s, oenologist Vassilis Vaimakis was “personally responsible” for upgrading production at the Amyntaio and Zitsa wineries, but this vineyard veteran decided to follow a slightly different path and take on the product that wine becomes: vinegar.
“As odd as this may sound, it’s as hard to make a good vinegar as it is to make a good wine,” he says. But he adds that making vinegar offers a freedom that wine doesn’t. “You can make a good vinegar without any intervention. any additive. All you need is a good culture, knowledge of how microorganisms act, and patience during the ageing process so that you don’t discard something that is developing well.”
Vaimakis’s family has been involved in food production since the late nineteenth century. In 1995, while director of the Zitsas winery, he sensed an opportunity as the only vinegar available commercially was mass-produced. He and his wife Katerina thus decided to make a career turn towards a product that traditionally held a high position in Greek households, which usually made their own.
“To make our vinegar, we use the traditional Epirus grape varietals Debina and Vlahiko. The grape mass is heated to break down the membranes and release the grape juices into the must. This is a process we’ve devised and have patented. The must is separated from the solids and transferred into old oak barrels for fermenting.” This can takes an average of ten to twelve months, after which the vinegar is aged in oak and chestnut barrels for about five years “to soften the flavor and develop aroma”.
Vaimakis believes vinegar is a “product of the future. It plays an important role in health, which science backs up. It helps remove toxins from the body, regulate the metabolism and control weight with its action on intestinal flora–in other words it’s a natural probiotic product–and is a dietary element for those with diabetes type B. In Japan, vinegar is held in such esteem that there are stores that sell only vinegar-based products.”
Vinegar-based elixirs were a natural next step for Vaimakis. These elixirs are blends of vinegar with the nectar of small berry fruits like sour cherries and cranberries that form a sweet-and-sour base for herb extracts to develop their flavors. Elixirs are used to dress salads “but also on grilled meat, ice cream, sweets, chocolate, and baked fruit. They can be drunk with crushed ice and are ideal alcohol-free digestives.”