It should come as no surprise to some of you, that dessert was also a highlight of my day while in Turkey. I always have room. And of course, because it’s vacation, I had extra room.
Growing up with Big Turk as a chocolate bar reality, Turkish Delight, or lokum, never held much appeal, even with me being a jelly candy kind of girl. Along with apple tea and carpets, you’re never very far in Turkey from someone wanting to sell you lokum. When something is everywhere, there is usually lots of bad. But when you do find the good stuff, you’re hooked. Kind of like with baklava. A lot of Turkish sweets are dripping in honey and simple syrup. And as I find with a lot of baklava here, more drippings are used to hide bad dough handling. Good dough handling, where the layers almost move from soft and rich to airy and crisp, results in the kind of baklava that entices you to eat piece after piece after piece…
Dried fruit was my sweet snack of choice. The unsulfured apricots were my favourite, but I also made my way through bags of black plums, yellow plums, cherries and black mulberries.
Pudding. Cream chose wisely when she placed Turkey under her finger on a map. This culture of pudding lovers was a perfect match for this all-things-creamy loving fool. Firin sütlaç is Turkish rice pudding and it always comes cold with a burnt top. Here, rice is a thickener rather than a star, so the grains are few and far between.
I would walk by the dessert shops and be mesmerized by all the puddings and their many colours. A banana pudding with tahini and grape molasses was particularly memorable given the unparticular setting of my hotel. When on the Cesme peninsula, I had the opportunity to fall head over with the flavour of mastic. Cookies, lokum, sugar-free gum. I loved it in all forms. Sakizli muhallebi with a topping of vanilla ice cream during my last night in Alacati made a particularly good impression.
The underdog: tavuk gögsü kazandibi. Burnt bottom chicken breast pudding. That’s right, chicken breast. A pudding made with finely shredded chicken breast to thicken it up. The first taste is a leap of faith, even when you’ve got some vanilla ice cream in there to mask any potential ick factor. No ick. All mmmmmmmmm…
You see the fibres. You know it’s chicken. But the only thing going through your mind is that it’s quite possible you’ll need another order because you’ve developed a strong affinity for it. It’s a thick thick thick vanilla pudding with an almost marshmallow-like texture that’s then accented with the extra sweetness that comes from being at the bottom of the pot.
Ciya Sofrasi has been written up by more than one author as being one of the best restaurants in Istanbul. I went twice. As much as I loved the starters and mains, I also went back because I wanted to try more of the desserts. The first go, I had kerebic, which is a semolina cookie/ball filled with pistachios. Not really crispy and not really soft, you use your fork to break into a wonderful green middle. It’s served alongside a sweet white foam that aids in digestion. The host described it in broken English as sort of being like marshmallow without the marsh. Whatever. It tasted delicious, especially when washed down with oregano tea.
The candied veg intrigued me to no end, and I had to try a little bit of both the candied eggplant and pumpkin… and the special pistachio baklava filled with cream. So sweet and chewy those veg were that I could only handle a few bites. You can see kaymak makes an appearance, as it did above, atop the ekmek kadayif (Turkish bread pudding) on that mixed plate of baklava. Are you surprised that I couldn’t escape its rich, creamy grip?
