Turkish Cuisine

A country that eats by region

Turkey has no single national dish because it has no single kitchen. The country stretches 1,600 km from the Aegean to the Iranian border, and the food changes with the climate and the neighbors. What a family in İzmir eats on a Tuesday would look foreign on a table in Gaziantep.

The Aegean coast cooks with olive oil, wild greens and lemon. The Black Sea lives on anchovies, corn bread and butter, with hazelnuts in everything.

The Southeast, centered on Gaziantep, Adana and Urfa, is the land of kebab, red pepper and pistachio. Central Anatolia, the old Seljuk heartland, works in dough: mantı, börek and flatbreads baked in a tandır oven.

Istanbul sits on top of all of it. Ottoman palace cooking, described in the kitchens of Topkapı Palace, pulled recipes from every province and refined them for the sultan's table. That palace tradition, plus a century of migration into the city, is why you can eat the whole country without leaving Istanbul.

Meze and the rakı table

An evening meal in a meyhane, a tavern, begins with meze. The waiter brings a tray of small cold plates, and you pick six or eight for the table. Standard choices include white cheese with melon, haydari (thick yogurt with garlic and herbs), fava bean purée, stuffed vine leaves, smoked eggplant salad and pickled sea bass.

Warm meze arrive next: fried calamari, liver cubes from Albania by way of Edirne, and stuffed mussels sold by the piece. Then the fish, grilled whole and priced by weight. The whole sequence is designed around rakı, the anise spirit that turns cloudy with water and is meant to be sipped over three hours, not drunk.

The same table, set with the morning's catch, runs the length of the Lycian coast from Fethiye to Antalya, where the meyhane moves outdoors and the fish costs less.

Kebab, and which kebab

"Kebab" in Turkey means meat cooked over charcoal, and there are dozens of named types. Adana kebab is hand-minced lamb with tail fat and red pepper flakes, pressed onto a wide flat skewer.

Urfa kebab is the same idea without the heat. Antep, meaning Gaziantep, adds pistachio, eggplant or garlic to the skewer depending on the season.

İskender kebab comes from Bursa: sliced döner over cubes of pide bread, doused with tomato sauce and browned butter, with yogurt on the side. Şiş kebab is cubed meat on a skewer.

Döner, the rotating spit, is a nineteenth-century invention from Bursa that became a global street food. Cağ kebab from Erzurum is döner turned sideways and carved with a horizontal skewer.

The best kebab restaurants, called ocakbaşı, seat you around the grill so you can watch. Bread arrives from the same charcoal, along with grilled pepper, tomato and a plate of raw onion with sumac. Ayran, salted yogurt drink, is the standard accompaniment.

Köfte, grilled patties of minced lamb and beef, is the everyday cousin of kebab, and the oldest köfte houses in the country stand on Divanyolu, a short walk from Hagia Sophia.

Bread from the oven: pide and lahmacun

Pide is a boat-shaped flatbread baked in a wood oven with cheese, minced meat or pastrami and egg. It is the Turkish answer to pizza and predates it in the region by centuries. The Black Sea version is long and narrow with a thick edge; the Konya version is thin and almost a meter long.

Lahmacun is thinner still: a round of dough spread with minced lamb, tomato, onion and parsley, baked in under two minutes. It is eaten rolled around fresh parsley with a squeeze of lemon, usually standing up. In Gaziantep and Urfa a single lahmacun costs less than a cup of coffee, and lunch is three of them.

Breakfast, the long meal

Kahvaltı, the Turkish word for breakfast, means "before coffee." It is the meal Turks are most proud of and the one visitors most often miss by ordering eggs at the hotel. A proper breakfast is a table of small plates: two or three cheeses, green and black olives, tomatoes, cucumber, honey with kaymak (clotted cream), jams, a fried egg dish called menemen, and warm bread or simit.

The city of Van in the east claims the biggest version, with its own breakfast street and plates running past thirty. Weekend breakfasts anywhere in the country run two hours and end with the tea still coming. Tea is not optional at breakfast; it is refilled until you turn the glass on its side.

Soups, vegetables and the olive-oil kitchen

Turks eat soup at every meal, including breakfast. Lentil soup is the daily default, and tripe soup, işkembe, is the traditional end to a night of rakı, served with garlic vinegar. In winter, tarhana, a dried fermented yogurt-and-flour mix, is reconstituted into a sour soup that every grandmother makes differently.

Vegetables cooked in olive oil, zeytinyağlı, are served at room temperature and are the quiet center of home cooking. Green beans, artichokes, leeks, stuffed peppers and imam bayıldı, a whole eggplant stuffed with onion and tomato, all belong to this group. They are the reason Turkish cuisine is far more vegetable-heavy than the kebab reputation suggests.

Sweets and the end of the meal

Turkish desserts divide into sherbet sweets, milk puddings and fruit. The sherbet group is led by baklava, layers of paper-thin dough with nuts and syrup, and includes künefe, a hot cheese pastry from Hatay. Milk puddings include sütlaç (baked rice pudding), kazandibi (caramelized bottom pudding) and tavuk göğsü, a pudding made with shredded chicken breast that tastes of nothing but milk and sugar.

Turkish delight, lokum, is not a dessert in the restaurant sense. It is offered with coffee, brought as a gift, and eaten a piece at a time. Fruit, especially melon and grapes in summer, ends most family meals at home.

Turkish coffee and tea

Coffee reached Istanbul from Yemen in the sixteenth century, and the city's first coffee houses opened in Tahtakale around 1554. Within a century, according to the traveler Evliya Çelebi, there were dozens, and the coffee house had become the male public square. The Ottoman army left sacks of coffee behind after the siege of Vienna in 1683, and Europe's coffee habit followed.

The method has not changed. Coffee is ground to a powder finer than espresso, put into a small long-handled pot called a cezve with cold water and sugar to taste, and heated slowly. As it rises, the foam is spooned into the cups, then the coffee is poured over it.

It is served in small cups with a glass of water and often a piece of lokum. The grounds settle at the bottom and are not drunk.

UNESCO added Turkish coffee culture to its list of intangible cultural heritage in 2013. The oldest name in the trade is Kurukahveci Mehmet Efendi, roasting beside the Spice Bazaar since 1871.

Sugar is decided before brewing: sade (none), az şekerli (a little), orta (medium) or şekerli (sweet). Afterward the cup is turned upside down to cool, and someone at the table reads the patterns in the grounds.

Tea, the daily drink

Despite the coffee history, the drink Turks actually consume all day is black tea. It grows on the steep, wet hills around Rize on the Black Sea, where plantations were established only in the 1930s and now cover the province. Turkey drinks more tea per person than any country in the world.

Tea is brewed in a çaydanlık, a two-tier kettle: strong concentrate in the small top pot, boiling water below. Each glass is mixed to taste, dark (koyu) or light (açık), and served in a small tulip-shaped glass that shows the color.

Sugar cubes go in the glass, never milk. Tea is offered in every shop, office and home, and refusing it is harder than accepting it.

Where to start

Eat breakfast once in a proper kahvaltı place, ideally on a weekend. Eat one Istanbul meyhane dinner and one ocakbaşı kebab dinner, preferably in the Southeast if you travel there. Have Turkish coffee after lunch and tea at every other hour, and let the rest of the map, from the Aegean to the Black Sea, fill in over the history of the places you visit.

Questions