Breaking the Fast in Turkey

I’ve been back from Turkey almost two weeks now and I’m still in vacation withdrawal. I miss walking down unfamiliar streets, having my daily soundtrack be an unknown language and every face being someone completely new. My stomach is also in withdrawal, especially as my vacation eating is usually double the caloric value of my everyday eating. Walking everywhere means my skinny jeans still fit, but now I unfortunately feel like I’m on a diet.

Breakfast turned out to be one of the most unexpectedly delicious occasions while there, and whether on my own or eating the free hotel spread, I was never disappointed. Especially because I made sure to fill up as much as I could to fuel my feet for most of the day. That means trying everything.

First and foremost, you don’t drink coffee with breakfast. The rich, sweet joy that is Turkish coffee happens after. During your meal (and for any other moment of the day for that matter), you drink tea. Strong, black tea in little glass cups. With sugar. As a change of pace one day, I also tried the more wintry drink of salep.

All meals come with bread. All types of bread. From basic French to fluffy pita, it’s always fresh and always ready to accompany the many Turkish treats that come at breakfast. Oh and simit often appears, that sesame not-quite-a-bagel baked good. Simit vendors can be found on every corner and they call out to you when you have hunger pains in the afternoon. But, be warned. A simit sitting too long is a simit only worth looking at. I learned my lesson after two bites and vowed to seek out one at a bakery to check the difference. There was a huge one, and it’s left me wondering what I ever saw in bagels.

For the savoury bites, you’ve got olives, tomatoes, cucumber, pastirma and a basic white cheese called peynir. A favoured egg dish is called menemen, which is scrambled eggs with tomatoes, peppers and spices served in the hot dish it is cooked in. Always slightly runny, menemen is perfect for dragging some fresh bread through. A place I frequented regularly in Istanbul specializes in the breakfast foods of the Turkish province of Van. Their “Van Breakfast Plate” came with, as you can see, five different cheeses, Turkish cacik (tzatziki) and bal kaymak.

Bal kaymak. Sometimes I think I went to Turkey just to eat bal kaymak, or honey and clotted cream. Thicker than the Devonshire cream we’re familiar with here, Turkish clotted cream thickly spread over bread and then drizzled with honey is what I want to eat for my last meal. That fat and sugar were the magic ingredients for keep me going and going and going all day on the streets of busy Istanbul. When I think about it now and realize I might never have it again, I start to well up a little. One proprietor even showed me camera phone pictures of the buffalo where the cream came from the day before. LE sigh.

For the sweet side of breakfast, you had your choice of jams and honeys, fruit and maybe some cake. At one favourite hotel, the homemade jams put every place EVER to shame. That’s 15 in the picture, but there were four more “special” ones that you got to sample on one of your mornings. The lavender still lingers on my tongue when I think *really* hard.