Cyprus
SEASONINGS
Cypriots ground up their flavors with fresh ingredients. They start with ripe tomatoes, cucumbers, lemons, greens, olives, and herbs that grow like weeds in the countryside. When they season seafood, it’s often just lemon, sea salt, and olive oil. Simple. Confident.
Herbs define the cooking style. Fresh mint gets heavy use in Cypriot cooking. It’s mixed into meatballs keftedes, salads, cheese pies. Often used alongside cinnamon. Oregano, parsley, and thyme add aroma to grilled meats.
Spices are used sparingly, except for coriander, which gives a warm citrus note in pork dishes, sausages, and breads. Aromatic onions and garlic form the base of many dishes, and bay leaves are often added to stews and rice. Salt, acid, and fat balance play a big role. Halloumi brings salt and chew. Olives bring punch. Lemon brightens almost everything. Olive oil ties dishes together. Many traditional meat dishes rely on red wine to build flavor.
Mahlab, with its sweet, almond-like flavor, features pastries; sesame seeds and tahini dips are also loved. Honey, preserved fruits sweeten desserts, and rose water provides fragrance.
There’s also a love of contrast. Hot grilled meats with cool yogurt or tzatziki. Crunchy salads next to tender braises. Salty cheeses with sweet watermelon in the summer. That mix keeps the food lively and refreshing.
SAUCES
TAHINI / TASHI sauce – tahini, lemon juice, garlic, cumin, olive oil and water. This sauce is served with grilled meats.
TALATOURI is Cyprus’s version of tzatziki. The key difference is that it uses fresh or dried mint and lemon juice instead of dill. The base is yogurt mixed with grated cucumber, garlic, and olive oil.
TARAMASALATA rounds out the trio. It’s made from cod roe, milk-soaked bread, potatoes, and olive oil, blended into a puree.
Colombia
SEASONINGS
Colombian seasoning is quieter than its neighbors’. Where Mexican cooking layers chiles and Peruvian leans aromatic, Colombian flavor is built on slow extraction: aromatics cooked down until they turn sweet, fats absorbing spice and carrying it through the dish. Traditional Colombian recipes are not spicy; heat is almost always added afterward by the diner using ají. Its not that Colombia does not have chili tradition – it does, and it’s still alive in indigenous communities and on the coasts.
Garlic, long-stem scallions, tomato, culantro, and cumin are core flavorings. They go in early and cook long. Culantro is not a finishing herb like cilantro, but a herb with a more intense aroma, tougher body, and more pungent to survive heat in stews. It goes into ajiaco broths and sancocho, where cooking time would reduce ordinary cilantro to nothing. Cumin also enters with the aromatics, blooms in fat, and sets the baseline earthiness in savory cooking. Oregano, black pepper, bay leaf support. Regular soft cilantro and galant solder guascas finish dishes. Guascas is lesser known outside of South and Central America. It’s an Andean herb, earthy and faintly nutty, somewhere between artichoke and lime, usually added late. Guascas is what makes ajiaco. Leave it out, and you have just a simple broth.
Achiote, or annatto seeds, native to tropical South America, is also steeped in oil at the beginning. That colored oil is what gives rice, soups, and stews their orange tint. It stood in for saffron when Spanish sofrito was adapted locally: achiote was cheap and grew everywhere, saffron was neither. The flavor it adds is faint.
SAUCES
HOGAO is the base sauce. Tomatoes and long green onions are cooked down slowly in oil with cumin until the mixture thickens and becomes jammy. It works at both ends of a dish — stirred into beans, rice, and braises at the start, spooned over arepas and patacones at the table. It looks like Spanish sofrito but parts ways on technique: cooked longer, reduced further.
AJÍ is the table sauce — chopped tomato, scallion, cilantro, and ají pepper, assembled raw and set beside the plate.
SUERO COSTEÑO, a fermented cream from the Caribbean coast, gets drizzled over arepas and fried food as a finishing sauce.
SALSA ROSADA — mayonnaise and ketchup combined, is on every street food: empanadas, patacones, hot dogs, arepas, fried chicken. This one often gets omitted, but it’s arguably the most ubiquitous condiment on an actual Colombian table (source).
