Things I Have Eaten in Turkey

[roadrunnertwice]

Let's go ahead and start with the intestines, because I know someone is going to ask me about that. There, it's out of the way. (They tasted fine, but I don't want that texture in my mouth ever again.)

Anyway, I tend to do a mostly vegetarian thing when I'm in the States, but that dog don't really hunt here, so I've just been eating what everyone else eats and figuring I'll balance it out later. Roll the film, please:

• Dürüm, a meat and vegetable roll-up of sorts made with extremely thin (~1mm) flatbread.
• Ayran, a salty diluted yogurt served as a beverage.
• Baked quince in honey with clotted cream.
• Pide (stuff-baked-on-top version).
• Pide (bare version, i.e. just flatbread).
• Helva with Antep pistachios.
• Quince braised with meatballs (both kinds of quince I had were pretty unbelievable; gonna have to learn how to wrangle that fruit myself, now).
• Dolma (tasted like dolma!).
• A ton of meze and salads I didn't even get the names of. (We went to this great restaurant in Istanbul called Çiya. Highly recommended.)
• Şeker (sugar) oranges, which are these seedless manderins with bright green or yellow rind. They taste exactly like the satsuma oranges we can get in the winter, but the contrast of green to shocking orange looks really alien and cool.
• Non-Cavendish bananas! Which tasted like... Bananas. OK!
• Lots of olives, mostly during breakfast. They sell uncured olives in the markets here, too, which are inedible but that's still kind of exciting. I'm at where olives come from! (When I was walking around outer Antep, I saw a group of older women and kids sitting on the sidewalk outside of a park sorting through a little wash-pool full of raw olives, which was yet another thing I'd never seen before. Dunno whether they were prepping them for sale or for curing.)
• Turkish white cheese and sheep's milk cheese.
• Pomegranates. Better than the ones we get here.
• Adana kebap. (I was actually about to just say "A couple kinds of kebap," but then Kate got on my case about it, and I totally should have recorded it so you guys could hear.)
• A COUPLE KINDS OF KEBAP, which I am now totally allowed to say, because we went to Imam Çaǧdaş after I wrote that last line and ordered the mixed grill, none of which did I have the training to recognize. It was all delicious, though.
• Also at Çaǧdaş, we had what was possibly, depending on who you ask, the best baklava in the world. (This is apparently part of an ongoing rivalry in Antep, which mostly produces the pistachio type rather than the more common walnut type. I don't know anything about the other contenders, but this was pretty fucking good.)
• A strange relative of baklava that looks like a shrimp and is composed of like 70% air and which collapses like a fatally-punctured diving bell when you put it in your mouth. (By the way, the waiters at Imam Çaǧdaş are really nice and bring you tons of free stuff you didn't order.)
• Lahmacun, which is a kind of loosely pizza-like dish except that the crust is really really thin and verging on crackery in texture; like with a New York slice, you eat it folded in half, except that you tear off a chunk first and put parsley and lemon on it. We actually made this the last time Kate was in Portland, and I think we got pretty close, although my crust was definitely too thick compared to the real thing.
• American-style oatmeal with fried apples and hazelnuts.
• SO MUCH TEA. The way the Turks make it is actually kind of weird to me: they stew it to undrinkability, then dilute it and add sugar. (No milk.) I was kind of worried that I'd be a mess of tannin stomachaches, but apparently diluting stewed tea magically negates its bad effects? Or maybe sugar helps neutralize tannins the same way milk does, except that doesn't really make sense. Or maybe I've partially outgrown that reaction, which might be an ok tradeoff for the onions thing. Okay, now I'm just rambling. -_-
• Börek, a flaky pastry roll filled with just about anything, which changes its character quite a bit depending on what it's being used for. There's greasy meat börek, sweet pistachio börek, cheese börek that resembles nothing so much as a macaroni and cheese croissant, and egg-and-yogurt börek that is almost quiche-like. …I ate a hell of a lot of börek, now that I think about it.
• Walnut cookies! Simple and good.
• Eggplant, which Turks cook better than I've ever had before.
• Soupy egg scramble alongside bread with honey and clotted cream.
• Muska, a dessert made from pistachio paste wrapped in a leathery skin made of dried and floured grape molasses. (Bringing a kilo of this home, if anyone's curious.)
• A hot yogurt soup with sheep meat and micro-dumplings, garnished with mint oil. I'll have to ask Kate about the name of this one again, because I can't quite remember it.
• Çi köfte, i.e. raw meatballs in lettuce. Surprisingly great!

…I think that's most of it.

Comments

[roler.livejournal.com]

You are totally making my mouth water! I want to try SO MUCH of that!

Also, I'm beginning to think that EVERYWHERE makes eggplant better than the states. I used to HATE eggplant until I came to Japan, and now I love it! Now, granted, this is partially because the vegetable itself is different; Japanese eggplants are way smaller than American ones and I like the flavor a lot better. Are the Turkish ones the same size/taste as the ones in the states?

But wow, I seriously want to try at least half of those things on your list. That yoghurt/mutton soup sounds fantastic, as does the pistachio baklava and... well, yeah, most of it really. Except the intestines, and again thanks to Japan, I DO already know what those are like, and no thank you.

[roadrunnertwice]

Yeah, they're the familiar-looking big purple motherfuckers, not the skinny ones or the little globe-shaped ones. I think they cook them softer than most Americans do, and plus there must be something going on with the choice of flavors they cook it with, because there's something drawing out the worst of the bitterness while leaving the interesting flavors.

Overall, Turkish food blew me away. I wasn't quite expecting that!

[emmling.livejournal.com]

I agree with Laura, there's a lot on this list I'd like to try!

And the pistachio baklava sounds great, especially as I've got a walnut allergy.

[roadrunnertwice]

It's a combination that works really well; the pistachios add a spike of funky and bitter notes that balance out the honey sweetness much better than walnuts are able to. I have no idea whether it's available outside southeastern Turkey, but I'll be keeping an eye out in the future.