Diamond Marcum felt the velvety bread dough and proclaimed: “Just like a baby’s butt!”
And that’s what it’s supposed to feel like — springy and smooth.
Marcum, 73, is the owner of Big Fat Greek & Italian Pastries, which sells goodies at local farmers markets. But on Monday she was giving her all as a volunteer, along with others from her church, making sweet (but not too sweet) golden braided Easter bread.
Roughly 700 loaves were made for the annual Easter Bake Sale on Wednesday and Thursday at Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church, near the University of Akron. In its 44th year, the sale will run from 10 to 4 p.m. each day, with traditional favorites such as baklava and Greek spinach and cheese pies along with the bread. (Last year, all the loaves were snatched up on Wednesday.) On Thursday, the regular weekly gyro lunch runs from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. The church is at 129 S. Union St.
For Marcum and the other women — and some men — the making of the Easter bread is pretty much an all-day affair, an annual ritual as familiar as dyeing eggs. While not part of church doctrine, the making of the bread and other goodies is a celebrated church tradition, akin to a Lenten practice.
“It’s therapeutic,” said Vasiliki “Vicki” Filippousis, 71. She immigrated from Greece to the Akron area when she was 17 years old and for years made custom dresses. “We get together, we talk, we talk about our [Easter] customs.”
Still, the day is bittersweet. “Some of our pioneers are gone,” she said, noting the deaths of longtime bread makers in the last couple of years.
While there’s a lot of yakking and laughter, the bread-making is serious business.
“People don’t know all that goes into making this bread. They just buy it and know it’s good,” said John Tsoras, 73, a retired engineer. Making it earlier would require freezing it; the bread is best when it’s fresh-baked.
Members showed up before dawn on bread-making day at North Hill Donuts on Tallmadge Avenue to begin the process. Tsoras, Filippousis and Marcum and a few others used the shop’s large commercial mixer, dumping in Robin Hood brand flour from super-size bags, along with dozens of eggs. Several years ago, church members landed on the idea of using a commercial mixer, and John Karnoupakis thought of North Hill Donuts, owned by a Greek, Louis Tsakalis.
Ten batches of the sweet dough were made at the doughnut shop, each containing more than 50 pounds of flour. The sun wasn’t yet up when the crew loaded more than 20 plastic tubs of dough into two minivans for transport.
At the church, once the dough had risen, volunteers dumped it from the tubs and divided it into roughly 700 1-pound rounds, using kitchen scales.
The next step was the most time-consuming, as more than a dozen volunteers at a time rolled and divided each round into three strips and braided them. The finished loaves were placed on baking sheets to go into the oven.
Some volunteers, like Tessie Lazos, 87, a retired personnel manager, carved out their own niche. Lazos stayed busy rolling the dough, leaving the braiding for other volunteers.
“I’m a part-time domestic even in my own house,” she said, giggling.
Penny VanDoros, 92, was among braiding stalwarts. She came up with the idea for the bake sale decades ago as a way to raise money to maintain a bus that the church had at the time.
These days, with the sale and other activities, the Ladies Philoptochos Society raises about $25,000 a year for local, national and international charities. For information, call 330-434-0000.
GREEK EASTER BREAD
8 packages (¼ oz. each) active dry yeast (Red Star brand)
3½ cups sugar
5 to 6 lbs. flour
¼ tsp. vanilla powder
1 tsp. ground mahlepi or 1 tsp. ground nutmeg
1 tsp. ground hiotiki mastika (see note)
2 tsp. salt
2 cups milk
1 lb. butter, softened
1 dozen eggs
1½ cups hot water
1 cup cooking oil such as canola
2 egg whites
Place the yeast and sugar together with 4 to 5 cups of the flour. Add the vanilla powder, spices and salt and mix.
Place the milk and butter in a saucepan and warm over low heat until the butter is almost melted. Add to the flour-yeast mixture. Add the eggs and water.
Place the mixture in the bowl of a stand mixer and mix, using a dough hook attachment. Add the flour and oil alternately. You may not need all 6 pounds of flour. Continue to mix dough until it pulls away from the sides of the bowl and clings in a ball to the dough hook. The dough takes about 20 minutes to make.
Dough can be kneaded by hand, or recipe can be cut in half and made as two batches to accommodate a smaller stand mixer.
Allow dough to rise, covered, until it doubles in size.
Once doubled, punch the dough down and divide it into nine portions.
Shape each dough ball into three strands to be braided. Bread can be baked on baking sheets or in metal pie plates.
Cover braids with plastic wrap and allow them to rise again until almost doubled.
Brush tops with beaten egg whites before placing in oven. Bread can be baked three loaves at a time.
Bake at 325 degrees for about 40 minutes. If the bread is getting too dark, cover it with foil and lower the oven temperature to 300 degrees to continue baking.
Makes about nine loaves of bread, about 1½ pounds each. Many makers of Easter bread put colored eggs into their braids.
Note: Mahlepi and hiotiki mastika are Greek spices. Mahlepi is the kernel of a wild cherry tree; hiotiki mastika is the resinous gum of a small evergreen tree native to the island of Chios, Greece. Both spices, which can be found at specialty stores such as Western Fruit Basket in Akron, must be ground before they are added to the dough mixture.
Recipe from Vasiliki “Vicki’’ Filippousis, Akron.
Katie Byard can be reached at 330-996-3781 or kbyard@thebeaconjournal.com. You can follow her @KatieByardABJ on Twitter.