Turkey: Food Post

One aspect we’re hoping to explore of each region is its food. Or at least the poor travellers’ version of it. Turkish food is alright. It’s like Greek food crossed with Indian food, kabobs and curries, but I found it to be more on the heavy side. I find it to depend on breads, meat, and cheese a bit much, like western foods.* However, I love a good Turkish breakfast. They slice up some tomatoes, cucumber and cheese as well as a small handful of olives, an egg (usually hard boiled, but we have also had it arrive sunny side up as well as mostly raw, which was gross) and single servings of butter, jam, and honey. There is of course the obligatory basket of bread (or bucket).



It appears a meal that would be easy to do well, but we’ve had some real stinkers. The raw egg is a low point, as well as squishy bad tasting olives, jam that was more of a soup, and sometimes they leave out one or several options.

The best meal we had the entire trip was at the hostel in Pummakale. The lady of the establishment cooks all the meals and it was a roasted eggplant curry thing and it was amazing. Even the other two travellers that were sucked in at the bus stop agreed it was the best meal they had had in Turkey.

We did some wandering around markets and food stalls and the price of produce in Istanbul is very cheap. And the pomegranates are astounding. They make the ones we get in Canada taste like grime. For 1.50 YTL (about a dollar twelve Canadian) we bought a pint of pomegranate seeds and they had such a ripe berry flavour that I regret not going back and buying the rest of them. Derek also bought a kilo of cheese, not realizing how much cheese that would be. It was salty string cheese. It lasted a long time.



As for street food, there are vendors littering the sidewalks of Istanbul. You can get simit (bread rolls, sort of like bagels), roasted chestnuts, some sort of tube shaped donut, roasted corn, a wet square pastry of some kind, pickles, and mussels. Mussels on the street. So tempting.

What could possibly go wrong?

*Derek disagrees with the term Western food, since technically Turkey is in both the east and west, and that the term North American food would be more appropriate. Personally I think he smells. So there.