Koulouri - Street Vendor is the sesame ring in its native habitat: sold from carts throughout Greek cities, handed over in a square of thin paper, eaten while walking. The bread itself is the same lean, sesame-crusted koulouri loop, but the street-vendor form is worth treating on its own because the selling conditions shape what you actually get. A cart is not a bakery. The ring you buy has been baked elsewhere, carried, and stacked, and the gap between when it left the oven and when it reaches your hand is the single biggest factor in whether it is good.
The build is plain. A firm wheat dough, lean, shaped into a ring, washed and pressed into sesame, baked to a tan crackling crust. The vendor's job is logistics, not baking: keep the rings off the cold metal where they sweat and go leathery, sell through the stock before it stales, and replenish from the bakery often enough that the stack is never a day old. Good cart work looks like a fast-moving pile, rings still faintly warm in the morning, sesame that smells roasted, a crust that gives a quiet crack when you tear it. Sloppy work is a tower of rings that has clearly sat: a soft, bendable ring with a dull crust, sesame gone slightly rancid, a dry crumb that crumbles to dust rather than pulling in a chew. Price and size are tuned to the format too, sized to be torn and shared or eaten in a few bites between transit stops.
The variation here is about timing and the cart's rhythm rather than the recipe. The early-morning ring, bought near the commuter rush when turnover is fastest, is the one to want; the same vendor's stock late in the day is a different, staler object. Some carts also carry the split-and-filled forms, with cheese, with ham and cheese, or sweet with chocolate, and those each deserve their own article rather than being crowded in here. The unadorned ring eaten plain on the move is the form this entry is about, and the bakery-fresh version off a counter, while built on the same dough, is a separate thing.