MARKETS : All From thr Oven: A World of Greek Goodies : At Golden Grains Maditerranean Bakery & Deli, you can get everything from <i> koupes</i> to olive cookies.

“You have to understand,” Eleftheria Cacos tells her visitor, “30 years ago in Greece almost no one owned electric or gas home ovens.

“On Sundays, before church, people would bring uncooked dishes of food down to the local baker’s. He would bake these in his bread ovens. After church, everyone walked back to the bakery to collect their dish. They bought pastries and bread still warm from the oven before going back home. And afterward, the whole family would gather for Sunday afternoon dinner.”

This is why you find much more than breads and pastries in many Greek bakeries. On the bakery case there might be trays of moussaka blanketed in bechamel sauce and dusted with grated hard cheese, often chunks of roasted lamb as well, and grape leaves stuffed with richly seasoned rice. At the best places, the baker refines his or her recipes to suit the tastes of the local clientele.

Cacos has patterned Golden Grains Mediterranean Bakery & Deli after those Greek bake shops. And like her counterparts in Greece, she tailors her cooking to local preferences.

“My customers are constantly health-conscious,” she says. “They don’t like greasy food, and many prefer vegetarian dishes.”

Since May, when she opened the bakery on a secluded street in the Redondo Beach Riviera Village, Cacos has experimented with her menu and recipes. In place of the roast beef sandwich, there’s a layered vegetable terrine--a vegetable moussaka of sorts--in a bechamel sauce made with olive oil instead of butter.

“It really works,” Cacos says triumphantly.

She’s also introduced a chicken version of traditional lamb-based gyro sandwich. She chills the homemade broth for her chicken-spinach soup before adding the vegetables so that she can remove all the fat.

It’s not just regard for American health consciousness that gives her food its appeal, but its refinement. The seasonings are balanced, the vegetables meticulously cut. She keeps her soups refrigerated and warms each serving to order because she says keeping them hot in display soup kettles over-cooks the vegetables and ruins the flavor.

I learned of Golden Grains from the recommendations of Greek food lovers--I would never have guessed from the name that it was a Greek deli.

The bakery is a simple room furnished with a few small tables and glass bakery cases holding rows of baklava and European pastries. If you get there early, a stack of warm breads will be cooling on a tall wire rack by the door.

When I asked about the round loaves, Cacos shrugged and said, “We just call them white or brown bread.” She maintains she’s not a “real” baker--she simply bakes as her grandmother did and as she was taught in school. If you went to high school in Athens in her day, you couldn’t graduate unless you passed cooking and homemaking; it was considered indispensable.

The skills intended for domestic life turned into Cacos’ essential professional tools. After her first North American job as a salad chef in a resort hotel, she cooked for and oversaw the kitchens of the three Greek-American coffee shops that she and her husband, George, owned for most of their 26 years of marriage.

George had also been a chef in American restaurants, and in the beginning their coffee shops catered strictly to American tastes with pancake-burger-pork chop fare. Mediterranean dishes were unfamiliar to most of their customers; when they opened a Greek restaurant in Washington State, it failed.

Little by little, though, the Cacoses introduced Greek or Italian dishes as daily or weekly specials in their coffee shops. Eventually, the menu at their main restaurant ran to 10 pages, including a hefty proportion of Greek and Italian dishes.

The current interest in Mediterranean cooking has given Cacos even more confidence to introduce lesser known Greek vegetable dishes. And she’s still thinking of her customer’s dietary preferences. Cacos has modified the recipe for her galaktoboureko --a rich dessert consisting of custard between layers of buttery filo pastry--to make it work with skimmed milk. Greek food purists might miss the fat, but Cacos believes that you can barely tell the difference. This low-fat galaktoboureko may soon go on her menu.

SHOPPING LIST

Baked Goods

Giant oatmeal cookies with raisins are Golden Grains’s best sellers, but you can also get traditional Greek cookies.

* Melomakarona: Here’s a cookie for lovers of monounsaturates --melomakarona is shortened not with butter or vegetable shortening but olive oil. The cinnamon-nut dough marries perfectly with the oil (well, basically it disguises it). After baking, the cookies are dipped into a light sugar syrup and rolled in nuts. They’re my favorites of all the cookies here.

* Koulouria: These long, thin cookies, delicately scented with orange juice and only slightly sweet, are served at tea parties; they’re wonderful for dipping in tea. A special ring-shaped version ( paskha koulourakia ) is made during the Easter season.

* Pasta Flora: You can find pasta flora in Italy, England and even Argentina. It’s basically shortbread frosted with fruit jam. Golden Grains makes two styles: a simple square of shortbread liberally spread with jam, or a variety that looks like a Linzer torte, with the jam sandwiched between two shortbreads.

* Khilopites Khoriatikes: In Greece, these tiny squares of semolina noodles are usually cooked in the broth or juice of roasted meat, absorbing lots of rich meaty flavor. In former times, country housewives would prepare these noodles from a mixture of semolina eggs and milk and roll them out by hand.

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Prepared Dishes From the Catering Menu

Although designed for party-sized portions, most of the following dishes are also available in small portions for take-out.

* Koupes: Cacos learned to make these deep-fried meat and bulgur dumplings from a Cypriot friend. They’re kin to the Lebanese kibbeh or kubbeh --in fact, they were introduced to Cyprus by Maronite Christians from Lebanon, who started emigrating there at the time of the Crusades. (There is still a village or two on Cyprus where Arabic is spoken.) Unlike the larger, torpedo-shaped Lebanese kibbeh , though, koupes are little round balls.

At olden Grains you can order your koupes to be stuffed with chicken, beef or lamb. Some like to accompany them with the yogurt-based dipping sauce tzatziki . In any case, they’re likely to disappear fast--”like popcorn,” Cacos says.

* Baked Salads: Cacos makes several of the baked mixed-vegetable dishes called yakhni . These belong to a broader category of vegetable ragouts known as lathera (also spelled ladhera ; the name comes from ladhi , which means “oil” in Greek, but Cacos has toned down the oiliness). These dishes are traditionally eaten at room temperature, which is probably why the menu refers to them as salads.

The baked eggplant salad, which also contains tomatoes, potatoes and garlic, is generously flavored with fresh dill and parsley, all cooked in a little olive oil. There’s also a baked zucchini salad and a baked cauliflower salad. Heated, these would make substantial vegetarian entrees.

* Anginares a la Polita: Small artichokes are quartered and baked with potatoes, carrots and fresh herbs. The term polita indicates that a dish originally came from Constantinople.

* Green Beans With Garlic Sauce: The tender, practically crisp green beans are tossed with lemon juice, olive oil and massive amounts of minced garlic.

* Village Potato Salad: Unlike the lathera dishes, in which several vegetables are cooked together, this is more like the familiar American potato salad, dressed with minced raw onion and a parsley vinaigrette.

* Skordalia: From Macedonia comes this bold puree of garlic and potato swirled with a hint of olive oil. It’s basically dip for the appetizer table, like tzatziki and taramosalata . Serve it with wedges of pita or raw or fried vegetable pieces. Some people use skordalia as a sauce for fried fish.

* Dolmades: The Greeks stuff any number of vegetables--tomatoes, eggplants, zucchini and sweet peppers are just the start of the dolma repertoire. Perhaps their best-known dolmades are the stuffed grape leaves. Cacos offers three stuffings: straight herbed rice, herbed rice with beef or a mixture of artichokes and peas. Cabbage-leaf dolmades are also on this menu. For them, you may choose tomato sauce or avgolemono , the slightly tart egg-lemon sauce.

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Take-Out Meals and Main Dishes

With all the entrees Cacos serves big slabs of freshly baked white or wheat bread along with a Greek salad, an enormous serving of fresh vegetables and lemon-scented rice or macaroni pie with feta cheese.

* Ratatouille: Although the menu describes this as “a vegetarian version of moussaka,” it’s not at all the familiar French melange of eggplant, peppers and tomatoes. It’s a kind of vegetable pie, constructed by layering sliced potatoes, eggplant, zucchini and tomatoes on a thin base of filo pastry. The vegetables are topped with bechamel sauce before being baked.

* Pastitsio: The stewed meat filling has a cinnamon-scented tomato sauce that is just bold enough to season the layers of cheese-sauced macaroni. Often called Greek lasagna, pastitsio uses tubular macaroni instead of a broad flat pasta for its basic ingredient.

* Lentil soup: From her grandmother’s recipe, Cacos makes a vegetarian lentil soup flavored with bay leaves and garlic. The thick, hearty blend gets a flavor boost from a splash of vinegar mixed with a bit of olive oil. Cacos says the vinegar is supposed to help you digest the lentils.

* Roast Chicken: Cacos drenches whole chickens in fresh lemon juice and stuffs them with herbs before roasting them. For her catering selections she also does a lemon-scented chicken breast stuffed with herb-laced feta cheese.

Golden Grains Mediterranean Bakery & Deli, 102 Via Valencia, Redondo Beach, (310) 375-0880. Open Monday through Saturday 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., Sunday 9:30 a.m. to 7 p.m.