Around the World in 26 Meals: No. 6 - Turkey
Intro
Across the Aegean, out of Europe and into Turkey! Well, out of Europe unless, by coincidence, everything I cooked is regional to Thrace. We do have one more transcontinental country coming up soon but otherwise these posts will all be Asian or in the Americas (with a possible brief hop over to a country that is technically Africa) until we cross the Atlantic in autumn. Apologies for anyone who wanted an Australasian post!
As for why I cooked Turkish - firstly, I like Turkish food. Also if I’m going west to east immediately after Greece seems about the right time to cook Turkish.
Secondly, it’s interesting how it’s both so similar but so different to Greek food - there’s a long history of Greeks and Turks living cheek by jowl, with the bulk of modern Turkey having been inhabited by Greeks/Romans before the Turks arrived and, until the horrific events of the 1910s and 1920s, there were plenty of Greek majority areas in modern Turkey and Turkish majority areas in modern Greece. Beyond the obvious, like religious restrictions meaning pork isn’t a thing in Turkish cuisine (though weirdly alcohol still is), how did these populations interact and how did this affect the food?
I’m sure some dedicated food historian could have a career purely looking at Turkish food and trying to piece together what came from the conquered Greeks/Romans, what the Turks never adopted from them, what came from elsewhere in the famously multiethnic Ottoman Empire (or the Caliphate before that) and what came riding in on horseback from Central Asia along with Seljuk’s descendants. I’m not that food historian, or even a food historian, but I’d happily read a book on it!
Thirdly, at the risk of spoiling later sections of this post, I tend to find the recipes in the book just work. Of course I’m going to use it, that makes cooking too many things way less stressful.
Breaking away to general site talk for a bit it looks like I missed the Dutch election for the politics side of the site. Bit of a shame really as Dutch elections are usually interesting but the British press aren’t usually interested unless the far right do well (which they didn’t this time, or last time). Oh well. Also missed the Israeli election but Israeli politics is confusing so I’m not sure I’d have written anything either way. Heartening to see Bibi not quite get the numbers to form a government though.
Anyway, back to cooking.
The book
Today’s book is the imaginatively titled Turkish Cooking by Ghillie Başan, and a staple of my cookbook collection - though sadly my copy is on its last legs with a lot of tears and stuck pages. At this point it’s probably worth mentioning that for this blog I don’t repeat recipes that I’ve cooked beforehand - so, sadly, the recipe in this book that involves cooking without a pan and directly on a gas ring won’t be coming out to play today.
Başan has had a career in writing cookbooks since the ‘90s (this book is a mid-late ‘00s publication) - the bulk of these are broadly Middle Eastern or North Africa, though she has a few South-East Asian themed cookbooks under her belt as well as a novel and a book on pairing food with whiskies. Despite the surname she is Scottish, her (ex-)husband was Turkish and she seems to have kept his name. She’s also done a fair bit of globe trotting and has lived in Turkey, which is always a good sign for an author cooking outside their cuisine.
In writing this blurb I also found out that we’ll be doing another one of her books in the near future. Not intended, but not the end of the world I guess. At least two other authors will repeat in this series of posts, what’s one more?
What I cooked (and adjustments)
I didn’t think it’d do to cook Turkish food for the blog and not do some meze, so I decided a good balance would be three meze, a main and a dessert - as this is five items in total I allowed myself a maximum of one involved recipe and opted for relatively simple ones for the other four items.
On that note, the most involved recipe I attempted was lahmacun - a flatbread with a topping of spiced lamb and tomato paste. This is often referred to as “Turkish pizza” and certainly when I visited Turkey (a long while ago now!) people seemed keen to claim it as a direct antecedent to pizza, even as the original version of the dish. Truth be told I’ve not been able to reliably establish any link whatsoever but it’s still a good food. It can be eaten like a pizza or wrapped up and eaten like flatbread.
For this I made two adjustments - the recipe calls for a bit under a quarter of a kilo of lamb mince. I don’t know where to buy that little, had no intention at the time to double the dough and had no other use for any excess. So I simply doubled the topping ingredients (except for onion) and made a thicker topping. Said topping is also supposed to have dried mint in, but I only had fresh in so I used that.
Next up was kısır, a bulghur wheat meze with herbs, chilli and onion. No adjustments were made for this, though I had intended to attempt the south-eastern variant on this dish, which is hotter. However this involved sourcing sour pomegranate and unsurprisingly I could only find ordinary sweet pomegranates (which weren’t needed for anything) - so I defaulted to the standard recipe.
The next meze is gypsy salad, which is essentially feta, red onion, chilli, peppers, parsley, sumac and either Turkish red pepper or paprika. The turkish name is çingene pilavı which literally translates to gypsy rice. The book explains the finely grated feta is supposed to represent rice (and it does look surprisingly similar) but doesn’t explain why the English translation calls it a salad or what any of this has to do with gypsies (if that’s the current appropriate term).
The main is swordfish shish kebab, in Turkish kiliç şiş. I assume this needs no further explanation!
Finally for dessert another self-explanatory dish - figs baked with honey, vanilla and cinnamon. Again, exactly what it sounds like.
For all these recipes I made my standard substitutions for garlic (usually asfoetida) and also any suggested substitution for Turkish red pepper when it appeared - I couldn’t find any in my usual go-to shops for unusual ingredients so this wasn’t really a choice. However there is a branch of The Spice Shop in my city so I suppose I should have also tried that. On the topic of spices I didn’t do my usual doubling of quantities of spice - I trust this book enough to not need to.
Cooking
We begin with lahmacun - this is my first recipe I’ve ever followed using yeast so it’s good to start early and allow some time for troubleshooting! Everything used in the recipe is pictured, although the fresh lemon juice and sumac are really only put on immediately before eating.
Did you know that yeast looks kind of disgusting? Now you do. The yeast is mixed with water and sugar and left for quarter of an hour until it gets all frothy.
Then the dough is made and the yeast added - this needs a fair amount of kneading to make good and elastic but ultimately everything works. The dough expands quietly and substantially in another room while I work on other things.
Did you know a paste made of lamb mince looks kind of disgusting? Now you do. It’s fried onion and asfoetida, cooled, and mixed with lamb, tomato purée, chilli, sugar and mint.
Despite it looking hideous it’s where a lot of the variation with different recipes happen - what goes with the lamb on top of a lahmacun is pretty flexible and I’ve gathered there are a lot of more spiced variants, involving spices like cinnamon or allspice. Sadly the book doesn’t go too much into this but there’s definitely room to experiment here.
The actual break from the lahmacun was earlier than this, while the dough was rising, but by the magic of artifice we’re going to pretend it happens here.
Looks like a prop for a zombie film, the stuff the actors playing the zombies are eating when they catch someone..
We now move onto the oddly named gypsy salad.
There’s a fair amount of chopping and grating, as well as blanching of tomatoes. A slightly odd step involves salting the chopped onions, leaving them and then washing them clean. First time I’ve done that with onions, though I’ve seen it with aubergines before.
And just like magic we have an assembled salad, in the loosest sense of the term “salad” given the amount of cheese in this.
With the paprika and sumac on this was actually very nice, though obviously a tad heavy with all the feta. However it was nicest in moderation - there was a bit too much onion for my tastes and that flavour built up unpleasantly if too much was eaten at once.
It’s kısır time! Thank you copy and paste for not making me figure out how to type a dotless “i”.
Some bulghur wheat is soaking in the background and, all of the other ingredients are pictured. Plus the finished gypsy salad. I don’t have much counter space so it had to go there for a bit.
The wheat is drained, tossed in olive oil and lemon juice, then transferred to my finest presentation saucepan before the purée is added to it.
All the chopped gubbins are then added, with a little sugar.
Mix and add some garnish and we’re done! As a big fan of laziness I approve of the fact that kısır is meant to be served at room temperature. No real pressure to get it out at any particular time.
Once again, delicious but a bit heavy on the red onion.
Swordfish skewers coming up - we’re getting through enough tomato purée that we’ve had to open a new tube.
The tomato and pepper are cut up into bitesized chunks, as is the swordfish. Then a marinade is made with grated onion, lemon juice, olive oil, asafoetida and tomato paste, and the swordfish chunks get to soak in it for a while.
Yeah, the marinade looks a bit manky. Does the job though.
While the swordfish rests in its delicious but ugly bath I rolled and stretched the lahmacun dough, distinctly failed to make it into an oval shape and smeared it with, to use the technical term, my lamb goop.
Still looking a bit B-movie prop.
After a brief but passionate affair with the oven the covered dough comes out cooked and ready to eat. And, although it caught a bit (my fault) and didn’t somehow get more oval inside the oven it does look decent-ish.
Tasted good too, not bad for a first try lahmacun!
Back to the shish and everything looks a lot more appealing once on skewers. The marinaded swordfish, pepper, tomato, bay and lemon look rather good.
And, as a minor hint that these photos may not be taken in the same order as the narrative there’s some lamb paste in the background. I guess this was taken while the lahmacun shown above were in the oven.
At this point I realise the skewers are too long for my least unsuitable pan, so I crack them in half and remount everything.
Then the kebabs get seared for a few minutes on each side, smelling lovely, and are then ready to eat!
I suspect a better pan, or some kind of barbecue setup, would have made these even nicer than they were but, as is, no complaints. They turned out well as apparently a metal pan with no oil can still give a bit of char to meat.
Finally, dessert. In this picture I’ve got all my raw ingredients ready, the can contains kaymak. This is a product described as being similar to clotted cream but made from buffalo milk. I wouldn’t say it’s that’s similar but it is still probably the closest comparison I can think of. It’s nice stuff in any event.
Curiously there seems to be a fair few Middle Eastern foods where the nearest Western equivalent is a very specifically British (or British and Irish) thing - kaymak being similar to clotted cream but also shepherd’s pie existing (with a twist) in the Levant and, reportedly, a similarity between bread sauce and some soups in the region - though I’ve not been able to verify that last one. Coincidence, direct influence or just a common culinary heritage across the Middle East and Europe that only survived at the edges of its range? Again, something I’d be interested to know.
Anyway, back to the figs. Before proceeding I prepped my vanilla sugar with my American Express Platinum Card, ready for a night out.
The figs are slit open and stuffed with the cinnamon sticks before being sprinkled with vanilla sugar and drizzled with honey. I went with posh honey as this is a pretty simple recipe and I suspected it would make a positive difference for this kind of thing in a way that, say, using honey on top of a crumble wouldn’t.
Baking the fruit softens them, infuses the cinnamon into the fruit and creates a lovely figgy syrup that can be spooned on top.
It goes in a bowl with kaymak. Looks pretty good, tastes very good.
What I’d do differently
Overall everything came out wonderfully on the first bite but I did find the amount of red onion to be excessive with both the gypsy salad and the kısır - though it did look nice. So I’d tone down the onion somewhat, maybe halving it. With the gypsy salad I’m pretty sure I was meant to use bigger tomatoes than I did so that too, I suppose.
I also put slightly too much water to soak the bulghur when making kısır, but I think I went a bit off-recipe there. I don’t think it made much difference but I’d probably try to follow that part of the recipe more closely next time to save the effort of draining the wheat.
With the shish I’d likely omit the bayleaf, which added little, and add a bit more lemon (which I think is possible to do within the recipe). I’d also probably find a different and flatter pan to cook them - it was necessary for the meat to sear so non-stick wasn’t ideal, but the pan I actually used was very stubborn to clean after!
I also found the lahmacun paste a little too thick so I’d be tempted to try the recipe verbatim next time and adjust from there to get something a bit easier to spread. And also try and make the flatbreads round, as they should be. Taste-wise they were fine and my only complaint was that they caught a bit, which was more me finding myself busy when the timer went off than anything in the actual recipe.
My view on the book
As is usual with cookbooks, particularly ones focusing on a specific cuisine, the book opens with an introduction about the country, its history and a broad overview of its food.
In this case the introductory pages clock in at just under 20 pages of a 150 or so page book, so a fairly decent balance between presentation and recipe content.
Content-wise this introduction is very informative and well-written - however if I were to criticise I would say the the quality of the photography is pretty hit-and-miss in this section (which is not true of the photos accompanying recipes) and often looks a bit stock, such as with the cheese in the bottom left there.
I’m also not a fan of having recipes in the introduction - ayran and pide are two such recipes hidden away in the introductory text and I think it makes them easy to overlook, despite being very famous Turkish foods. Or drink in the first case, I guess.
Within the main body of the book, the recipes themselves are beautifully presented, with images illustrating every recipe and each recipe provided in a range of units - curiously although metric is presented first (as is ideal for me) there is a sense that these recipes were developed in old fashioned British Imperial and that the metric and American units are the conversions. Nothing wrong with that, just a quirk that a lot of recipes seem built around ounces.
Ultimately though these recipes do just work. This is the only cookbook I can think of off the top of my head where you can follow almost any recipe faithfully and be very likely to get it coming out exactly as intended, without any adjustment whatsoever. That’s a remarkable feat.
The biggest flaw with the book in my view is a purely mechanical one, for whatever reason the pages are very prone to sticking together and tearing - my kitchen is small and it’s hard to prevent occasional spillage so a few pages in this book have become unusable from this. Probably the only book I own where this is a serious problem.
In case it isn’t clear by the fact I’m talking about the quality of the paper when attempting to state the negatives, I whole-heartedly recommend this book. A core part of my cookbook collection and, if you are interested in cooking Turkish it should probably be part of yours too.