The food of Turkey

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These notes were made during a short trip to Turkey. These are just our food experiences and you may have a totally different experience depending on your budget, where you travel and where you eat.

Notes from July 2005

Turkish food uses lots of pide bread and eggplant (aubergine), and they love to stuff things, peppers, eggplant, vine leaves and more. Kepap (identical to the Greek kebab) is a national dish, found in every second food shop, either chicken or lamb or beef. Pistachio nuts are also very common.

Breakfast
The usual ‘tourist’ breakfast consists of tomato, cucumber, goat’s cheese, olives, bread with jam or honey, and occasionally with a boiled egg. The working class breakfast which makes for s great start to the day is soup with a pile of flat bread; most common are lentil and spicy tomato.

Kepap
Doner kepap is meat marinated and placed on a large vertical skewer. Sliced off as it is cooked, it can be eaten in a roll with lettuce, tomato and salt/pepper, or on a plate with salad and rice/bread. Sish kepap is meat on a small skewer grilled, and served with vegetables, rice and bread.

Mezze
This is a popular way of eating in Turkey. Bite size foods, either eaten individually as an entree, or as a combined ‘mezze plate’ where you can choose a small amount of several types to enjoy together. A greatway toexperience a range of foods, including the following:

• stuffed vine leaves - this is using grape vine leaves, usually filled with flavoursome rice
  stuffed zucchini flowers
  
• stuffed peppers (capsicum)
  
• zucchini fritters - with grated zucchini
  
• yoghurt and red pepper dip
  
• thinly sliced eggplant wrapping some crumbly goats cheese and parsley
  
• Russian salad - creamy potato salad with peas and carrot

Pide pizza
Again a very popular dish, a long folded pizza with various fillings, vegetarian, minced lamb, chicken

Simit
sesame covered bread rings, great for a snack, or breakfast on the go

Su boregi
noodle like pastry layers with white cheese and parsley between the layers, also great for breakfast on the go

Gozleme
flat bread fried, rolled with a filling of cheese or potato

Clay pots stew
In Capadoccia, a central region of Turkey, it was common to have a stew cooked in a clay pot, which is broken at the table for you to eat from

McDonalds
An interesting Turkish addition to the standard menu was the McTurco flat bread burger

Desserts

• Turkish delight - loads of it all over Turkey, coming in many different flavours/colours, with nuts or other ingredients
  
• baklava - again a very popular sweet found anywhere, layered pastry, honey and crushed nuts, in a variety of shapes and sizes
  
• ice cream - the ice cream is so gelatinous in Turkey that the seller can pick up about 20 litres of it with a crowbar and hang it in front of you, while it stretches out.

Drinks

• Ayran - a natural yoghurt drink
  
• chay - black tea is very common, drunk at all times of the day, consumed in little tulip shaped glasses
  
• coffee - drunk very strong and with lots of sugar and no milk
  
• Raki - aniseed alcohol drink

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