Korakis Chios Mastic Paste with Mastic Oil — Greek Ypovrychio

This is the Greek sweet known as ypovrychio — "submarine" — a thick white mastic paste that islanders on Chios serve on a spoon plunged into a glass of ice-cold water. You pull the spoon out, let the paste slowly soften in your mouth, dip it back to chill again, and repeat until either the water warms up or the sweet is gone. Korakis-Marinos has been making it on Chios since 1937, where the family's third generation still runs the factory at Chalkios, eight kilometres outside Chios town. What makes it taste the way it does is the mastic oil — pressed from the resin of Pistacia lentiscus var. chia, the mastic tree that produces usable "tears" only in the Mastichochoria villages of southern Chios. Chios mastic has held EU Protected Designation of Origin status since 1997, and the cultivation know-how was added to UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2014. The flavour is hard to compare to anything else: faintly pine-like, cooling, slightly bitter at the edges, then sweet. Artificial mastic flavouring tastes flat next to it. Beyond the spoon-in-water ritual, the paste works as a concentrated mastic flavour base in the kitchen. A teaspoon stirred into warm milk puddings — muhallebi, sütlaç, rice pudding — carries the aroma through the whole pot. It folds into ice cream bases, cookie doughs, and cake batters, and in Turkey it is spread on breakfast bread like a preserve, which is why Turkish speakers call it sakız reçeli, mastic jam. The paste comes in a sealed white-lidded tub in two sizes, 300 g and 600 g. The texture is dense and chewy at room temperature and firms up in cold water — exactly how the ypovrychio is meant to behave. Korakis-Marinos produces under ISO 9001:2015 and HACCP certification, and its sweets ship from Chios to markets across Europe, the UK, and the Arab world. This tub is the same one sold in Greece.