DIANE KOCHILAS: Today I'm taking a deep dive into the world of traditional Greek probiotic foods.

Everything from crunchy pickled vegetables to creamy Greek yogurt and even a fermented Greek grain product called trahana.

Joining me is Dr.

Theoklis Zaoutis, a fellow Ikarian and leading scientist whose research compares the gut biomes of older and younger Greek islanders.

Why is this such a hot topic now?

DR.

THEOKLIS ZAOUTIS: Our ability to pick up genes and do genomic analyses and things like this have led to scientists saying, oh, we can actually explore these relationships now.

DIANE: Together we'll explore how to bring traditional Greek probiotic foods into your everyday meals.

I'm making a trahana soup with Greek yogurt.

Oh, I really love this dish.

A fermented cabbage and chicken stew.

The cabbage is very mild, but it's got a nice crunch to it.

And even probiotic sandwiches.

There's a whole vegetable market of flavors going on in here.

It's really good.

Join me on My Greek Table as we explore the Greek way to gut health.

One flavorful probiotic bite at a time.

♪♪ ANNOUNCER: My Greek Table with Diane Kochilas is made possible in part by... The Fillo Factory.

Grecian Delight Kronos, A family committed to better eating.

The National Hellenic Society.

And by the following... [Uptempo pop music] DIANE: Gut health is a hot topic in wellness and longevity studies these days and for good reason The gut is often called our second brain and is at the heart of so many aspects of well-being.

Probiotics, those living beneficial bacteria are essential allies in this process.

Cabbage.

Luckily when it comes to feeding our microbiome with what it needs and craves, the Greek and wider Mediterranean diets may be the ultimate secret weapon.

Rich in naturally fermented foods like yogurt, olives and even tangy pickled vegetables, this ancient way of eating delivers a steady supply of probiotics and prebiotics; fibers that fuel those good bacteria and keep our gut ecosystem in balance.

Even traditional comfort foods like trahana made with a fermented grain that was an ancient way to preserve dairy are a part of that mosaic.

Today the foods of Greece will bring both flavor and balance to your gut and when your gut feels good, so do you!

DIANE: Welcome to my kitchen.

DR.

ZAOUTIS: Thank you for having me.

DIANE: My house my home.

I think the last time I saw you was on Ikaria.

DR.

ZAOUTIS: Yes it was.

DIANE: Dr.

Theoklis Zaoutis is the former Chief Medical Officer of Greece's CDC.

Why is gut health so important and why is it this suddenly this big subject?

DR.

ZAOUTIS: Gut health depends on the microbiome.

So let's define what the microbiome is.

It's the milieu of bacteria that live in our guts.

DIANE: Okay.

DR.

ZAOUTIS: And what many people don't realize is we are more as a human body more bacteria than human cells.

DIANE: I didn't know that.

DR.

ZAOUTIS: Yes, so many more bacteria just in our guts than there are in our whole rest of our body.

DIANE: Okay.

DR.

ZAOUTIS: The bacteria in our guts are responsible for that digestive processes.

Meaning which nutrients are extracted from the foods we eat?

How effective those nutrients are extracted, how they're metabolized?

Second, the immune system.

So we think of lymph nodes and our blood, because it has immune cells the gut is the biggest single immune organ in our bodies.

And what do our bacteria the normal bacteria do?

They train our immune system to keep a balance.

So when you change that balance by changing the microbiome you predispose us to conditions that are related to a poor immune system or are dysregulated in, where the immune system may fight our own bodies and the microbiome is responsible for keeping that balance.

DIANE: Some of the healthiest foods in the world that we can eat are fermented foods.

On the Greek table we have a great array of delicious different fermented foods that are part of our tradition.

Among the most unique is this fermented wheat product called trahana one of the oldest foods in the world and something I like to call the world's first slow fast food.

This is a very very simple recipe to make and it cooks up into a delicious creamy porridge.

[Sizzling] I just want to get the onion nice and soft.

It's going to take a few minutes.

I love this stuff!

I raised my kids on trahana because it really takes just a few minutes to cook.

At some point when my daughter was maybe about five or six years old, uh she kind of rebelled and said, mom, I need something else for dinner.

Lo and behold, 15 or 20 years later, uh when she was a college student in the United States, she called me one day very meekly and said you know, mom, manoula, that's her word for uh cuddling up to me.

Uh do you know where I can find trahana in New York?

And I- you know I did.

I directed her to a couple of Greek stores, and that was her fast, slow food for busy, you know, young college student on the go.

I'm adding my garlic next.

Also, if you choose to eat this for breakfast as a porridge, you can add other things to it too.

You can add dry fruits or nuts to it.

It's really, really versatile.

I always sauté the trahana a little bit because it makes it even nuttier.

Once this is cooked, all these pieces that are a little bit uneven and different sizes will all meld together into one beautiful thick porridge.

This is made with a combination of wheat and milk, or wheat and yogurt, or wheat and buttermilk, and then left to dry and age a little bit.

That's where the fermentation process comes in.

And that's what makes it probiotic.

I'm going to loosen this up with a little bit of vegetable stock.

And the trahana will take four to six, maybe even more, at times its volume in liquid.

So we'll see this thicken up in just a few minutes, and it will change completely.

While the soup is starting to simmer, I've got some Greek yogurt, red peppers that have been roasted and preserved in brine.

And I've also got something that's kind of a new product in the Greek kitchen, which is fermented garlic.

It's left to age until it turns black and very sticky.

And what you end up with is garlic that's much, much sweeter.

I'm going to make what I'm adding to the trahana, which is the roasted red peppers, turned into a puree.

And the garlic.

I'm just gonna chop this up a little bit.

Some dried Greek oregano.

A little hot sauce, because I like it.

[Whir of food processor] I want to show you what the trahana looks like because it starts to break down and it all becomes this beautiful, creamy, porridge-like soup that cooks up in very little time.

The roasted red pepper puree goes in next and this will just add some color to the soup but also a lot of flavor.

This is already turning into a beautiful pepper red country soup.

It has a lovely sour flavor, the trahana.

And I like to enhance that by adding a little bit of lemon zest and lemon juice.

[Banging] And just a touch of Greek sea salt.

I just want to taste this to see how much more cooking it might need because these little pieces need to be totally soft.

Mmm, perfect.

I want to top it with a little bit of Greek yogurt and some lemon juice and just a bit of olive oil.

[Tapping] A little squeeze first into the soup.

And a little bit into the yogurt.

And of course some olive oil.

And we just want to whisk that all together.

This is my garnish and I like to put it in a squeeze bottle and just kind of make a design over the top of it.

I can't wait to try this.

It's one of my favorite recipes.

So simple, so nutritious, so comforting, and so easy to make.

Just a little bit of that on top just for some fun.

Put a little bit of roasted red peppers over this if you'd like, a touch of olive oil never harms anything and maybe a little black pepper.

[Cracking pepper] And one last little detail from my kitchen garden here, a little bit of fresh oregano.

I can't wait to dip my spoon into the trahana.

[Soft tapping] Oh, I really love this dish and I love adding hot pepper to it or spicy chili or hot sauce because the sourness and the softness of trahana is literally punctuated by the spice.

It's such a great combination of the lemon just makes everything come to life.

The yogurt makes it look great and adds its own little probiotic touch.

To me, this is the perfect example of really healthy food that's perfect for gut health, but more important than that, it's just going to satisfy our bellies in the most delicious way.

DIANE: The whole notion of let food be thy medicine is absolutely spot on.

DR.

ZAOUTIS: Diet is probably one of the major factors in your microbiome.

Things we do or take other than foods like medicines may impact our microbiome as well.

So one specific um drug or medication or antibiotics... DIANE: Right.

DR.

ZAOUTIS: Antibiotics kill bacteria.

So when they kill bacteria, they change that balance between what we call in the microbiome the good bacteria and the bad bacteria.

And if you allow the bad bacteria to predominate, it alters that balance and then alters our health.

Um and there are many other drugs that can alter um, the microbiome.

DIANE: If you have an unhealthy gut, A, is it possible to change it?

B, how long does that take?

DR.

ZAOUTIS: Yes, it's possible to change it.

It's not a tomorrow morning type of thing... DIANE: Right.

DR.

ZAOUTIS: That if I drink your herbal tea, my microbiome will get better tomorrow, but I'm sure it will affect my microbiome over time.

It takes probably several months and we know that from taking antibiotics.

After you take antibiotics and you negatively affect your microbiome, it takes probably a couple months for it to come back to where it was.

DIANE: Okay, that's interesting.

DR.

ZAOUTIS: And it's a pitch for us not to use antibiotics inappropriately, which as a society we uh, do a lot of.

DIANE: I'm making a chicken and cabbage stew today, but not just any old chicken and cabbage stew.

This recipe calls for pickled or fermented cabbage, láchano toursí as we say in Greece.

It's actually a recipe that's typically made with pork but I lightened it up a little bit and I'm making it with chicken today borrowing from a recipe from northern Greece which calls for the fermented cabbage.

We want a nice golden crust on the chicken.

That's exactly what we're looking for.

One of the common mistakes when you brown meat, is playing with it in the pot.

Let it work for you.

Let the crust form on the bottom before you flip it over that's an easy tip to remember.

The chicken is nice and browned.

Time to deal with the onions.

I'm going to just replenish the oil in here a bit.

[Sizzling] [Scraping] I'm scraping up whatever delicious little bits of chicken or chicken fat might be left in here too.

Ready for the tomato paste.

It really does take on a whole other flavor dimension when you cook it together with the olive oil and the onions.

It becomes much richer and almost denser.

I'm gonna let this simmer for a few minutes and get the cabbage ready.

Here in Greece, this is often the way we find fermented cabbage.

What we commonly know in the United States as sauerkraut.

We sell it whole but you can also find it shredded but I love to buy the whole kind because you buy them in these these shops that have usually a whole range of pickled vegetables and it's just kind of a throwback to another era.

I'm just getting out the core of the cabbage because it's a little bit dense.

That comes out.

And we can discard this and I've actually drained the cabbage.

There was a lot of liquid in here.

So this is basically your everyday head of cabbage.

Put up in a salt brine.

The salt brings out all of the liquid in the cabbage itself.

It develops enzymes that are really good for our gut health.

It becomes even more rich in vitamins B and C. So there's a lot of good things going on when you ferment cabbage.

So I'm just gonna get these into slightly smaller pieces to accommodate the size of the chicken.

And I can break apart the pieces.

They're gonna come apart anyway as they cook.

Now if you wanted to do this with sauerkraut you could.

You might want to taste it before you start cooking with it in case it's a little bit too salty it might need to be rinsed.

Cabbage was something that people used to put it in brine at home.

I do that in the summers in Ikaria.

I preserve all sorts of garden vegetables.

So these are still living traditions in this part of the world.

Time to add some of the spices.

I've got a little bit of whole allspice here.

Allspice berries which we use a lot in the Greek kitchen we call them bachári.

A little bit of bukovo or hot pepper flakes.

A very very beloved uh ingredient in northern Greece where this recipe is from.

And some paprika.

I just want to season the chicken since I didn't do that while browning it.

[Cracking pepper] And maybe a pinch of paprika over the chicken too.

Just for good measure and some nice color.

Chicken goes in next.

We obviously want all this delicious juice.

[Tapping] Just mixing all of this together.

Before adding the red wine.

[Tapping hard] Just a little bit of water to make sure there's enough liquid in here for all of this to cook.

Ready to cover this and let it do its own work.

Ooh.

This has been cooking for about a half hour.

It looks great.

It smells even better.

Time to add the remaining ingredients just to finish it off.

A little bit of lemon zest.

[Rubbing] [Tapping] A little lemon juice.

And finally a little bit of dill.

[Snipping] It doesn't have to be finely chopped... Because this is actually a very rustic dish.

[Snipping] And I think we're good.

The cabbage has taken on a lovely, almost caramelized hue to it and everything smells really good and it's time to get this served up.

I'm really looking forward to tasting this.

Mmm.

It is surprisingly subtle.

Everything is really nicely melded together.

Now the chicken is delicious, it's very tender.

The cabbage is, again, very mild, but it's got a nice crunch to it.

The dill perks everything up.

And there's a very, very, very subtle spiciness to this because of the hot pepper flakes and that earthy smoky quality of the paprika.

So this is totally a winner.

Um, a probiotic standout that's a feast of health.

DIANE: Why is this such a hot topic now?

DR.

ZAOUTIS: I think one is that we now have the technology to study the microbiome.

So if you think about how many millions of bacteria and different types of bacteria are in the microbiome, the technology was needed to be able to tease this apart and study it.

And I think the last 20 years, with the advent of our ability to pick up genes and do genomic analyses- DIANE: Right.

DR.

ZAOUTIS: And things like this, have led to scientists saying, Oh, we can actually explore these relationships now.

DIANE: Okay.

DR.

ZAOUTIS: What's very interesting is this um, mind-gut relationship.

The relation between what's in our guts and the food we put in in the microbiome and our brains.

And that's some- an area that's been exploding lately, that mental illnesses, schizophrenia, may be related to this dysregulation of the immune system.

DIANE: Really?

DR.

ZAOUTIS: Yeah.

Then there are so many things now that are coming out around how this affects our health in totality.

DIANE: I'm making two really healthy, hearty, delicious probiotic sandwiches today with two different proteins added to them.

One is a kind of falafel with spanakopita flavors and chickpeas, and the other is a very traditional gavros marinatos or marinated anchovy fillets.

The first thing I want to do is make the "mayo".

Don't imagine what you know as regular old mayonnaise.

This is a Greek yogurt based mayo with kalamata olives and fermented garlic, black garlic.

I'm just going to take a little bit of the yogurt.

This is a sheep's milk yogurt.

You can easily use the kind of Greek yogurt you find in uh your supermarket.

Um, you just want it to be nice and thick.

That's the most important thing.

The kalamata olives go in next.

These are already pitted.

And the fermented garlic.

And just a little bit of lemon juice.

I want this to be spreadable, not runny.

[Whirring of food processor] You can use almost any kind of fermented or pickled vegetable and yogurt to make your own sandwich spread.

I have a little bit of shredded red cabbage in this recipe.

It's something that we use in salads quite a bit in the Greek kitchen.

[Chopping] I want to get all my sandwich ingredients in one place.

Next I have some cornichons here and just to make it a little bit easier to fill the sandwich.

I just want to have a flat surface on them, so I'll cut them in half.

And I have pepperoncini peppers here just to add a little spice.

They're also preserved in salt brine and we want to get the seeds out.

And the roasted red peppers, they're nice and fleshy.

So there'll be a lot of different textures in these two sandwiches.

A little bit of fresh arugula, which is nice and peppery.

And we just want to get the stems off because they're not very pleasant to eat.

The avocado.

You want to use a ripe avocado but one that's still firm because we want to slice this.

So that's really important to remember.

You kind of want to work your way around the skin.

And then just slice the avocado.

This is a little soft.

I'm making two different versions of the same sandwich, basically, with two different proteins.

One is a fritter made with a spanakopita filling and chickpeas, and if these are ready made then all you have to do is pop them in the air fryer or in the oven, they're really easy or the microwave.

And the other is a more traditional, what we call in Greek, gravros marinatos, or fresh anchovy fillets in a beautiful vinegar, uh salt, and olive oil marinade.

So I just want to cut these in half to make them a little bit easier to fit into the actual sandwich.

And I'm using two different kinds of bread, both sourdough.

One is a sourdough white bread and one is a sourdough whole wheat.

And you know these sandwiches are kind of a meal in themselves.

You can see how much is going into them.

They're very filling.

And the first step, of course, is to spread this delicious kalamata olive Greek yogurt, "mayo" over the bread.

Adding some delicious roasted red peppers.

These are actually Greek peppers.

They're called piperies florinis.

You can use any good um, roasted red bell pepper.

And if there's a logic to building a sandwich, it's you want to put the things that are most you know steady, the most stable on the bottom, and then build from there.

And just a little bit of the shredded cabbage.

It adds a really nice texture to the sandwich.

Arugala goes next, which we call roka in Greek or rocket.

There's also a kind of wisdom.

The more colors in a dish, the healthier.

And that holds true for sandwiches, for salads.

In other words, the more vegetables you have in a dish, the better.

That looks gorgeous.

Some nice avocado slices.

And I'm just going to get a few of these chickpea spanakopita fritters in here.

This is a very, very easy addition.

And next, the anchovies, packed with omega-3 fatty acids.

Really good for you.

There's something really endearing about two sandwiches that are literally cover-to-cover, packed with probiotics and very Greek and Mediterranean at the same time.

And I'm looking very forward to taking a bite.

So let's taste the Mediterranean chickpea fritter with the spanakopita filling as our protein in the first sandwich.

This is a big mouthful.

[Chuckles] Mmm.

The fritters are really substantial.

They have a lot of body to them.

There's a whole vegetable market of flavors going on in here.

It's really good.

Let's see what a marinated anchovy tastes like inside a probiotic sandwich.

Mmm.

The flavors in here are pretty complex.

I'm getting a lot of the beautiful flavor of the arugula which is very peppery, the crunch of the red cabbage, but it's that anchovy that really comes through and it works really great with the kalamata olive Greek yogurt mayo.

So enjoy!

There's nothing like a great sandwich and if it's filled with probiotics and has a little Greek identity all the better.

DIANE: For recipe links and information about My Greek Table , visit my website, DianeKochilas.com.

ANNOUNCER: Diane's cookbooks, "The Ikaria Way" and "Athens: Food, Stories, Love" are available to purchase online at DianeKochilas.com or call the phone number on the screen.

My Greek Table with Diane Kochilas is made possible in part by... The Fillo Factory.

Grecian Delight Kronos, A family committed to better eating.

The National Hellenic Society.

And by the following... [Speaking in Greek]