EatingAsia

Real Nuts

"Milky" almonds and walnuts for sale on a stretch of highway north of Aksaray, Turkey

    Each time we come to Turkey I'm more and more convinced that most Americans (and probably many folks in the rest of the world too), have never tasted a proper nut or piece of dried fruit. A walnut straight from the shell, not more than a month off the tree, so fresh it almost oozes oil when crushed between the your teeth. An apricot dried whole in the sun, brown because it hasn't been treated with the sulfites that prevent the fruit's orange from leeching out with its moisture. Shriveled purple plums dried with their pits unremoved, so different from the sticky glyceride-plumped "prunes" we Americans buy in zip-top bags and cardboard canisters that it's hard to imagine the two are the same fruit.

    Last autumn at a market in Gerze, on the Black Sea, we bought raisins -- big, almost black, half-shriveled, with their stems still attached. We ate them by the handful, marveling that something we used to eat out of a box, something that required "plumping" in water before adding to bread or cookie dough, could be leathery yet soft and chewy, with a depth of flavor approaching something like burnt sugar. Another surprise: they crunched. Those raisins had been grapes with seeds -- unheard of in the States (elsewhere? I don't know). Those seeds, tiny and no more consequential than a poppy seed after drying, added a wonderful texture.

   Last month in a guest post for Istanbul Eats (read it here) I wrote about one of the pleasures of road-tripping in Turkey: stockpiling a backseat larder of market finds and then stopping between here and there, when the stomach calls, to cobble together a meal.

    This is another: pulling to the side of the road when you spy a stall in front of a cherry orchard selling the fruit at 3 kilos for 5 Turkish lira (on the road to Van, 1 hour west of Bitlis). Or, in today's case, stopping at the stall pictured above on our way from Aksaray, on Cappadocia's northeastern edge to Cankiri, a town about an hour and a half east of Ankara. The vendor on the left and his son, on the right, were selling almonds, walnuts, raisins and dried apricots. The almonds were lightly salted and roasted in their shells, which were cracked just enough to enable easy liberation of the nut; we bought 250 grams. We skipped the walnuts (no nut cracker) but bought 250 grams of raisins and half a kilo of apricots. Total damage: 13 lira (about U$7).

    The vendor's fruit is from his own orchards and vines. He dries them himself, in the bahce (garden). The almonds are indeed "milky", as advertised in his sign, moist in spite of their roasting and touched with the taste of wood smoke because of it, nothing like the packaged roasted almonds I grew up eating nor the expensive blanched almonds my mom hoarded for baking. The raisins are black and delightfully crunchy, not seedless, almost juicy.

    The apricots, dried on their pits, are terra cotta brown and tough. But put one in your mouth, allow it to soften in the heat and moisture of your saliva for less than a minute, and the flesh slips from the pit with barely a nudge of the incisor. And the flavor! Honey and fruit and hot dry August days exploding all at once from nothingness. I wish that everyone could taste a dried apricot like this (or a roasted almond like that).

    Given their imperviousness to casual nibbling I suspect that these particular dried apricots are meant to be cooked with meat in a stew or plumped in a compote. But we'll carry them home to Malaysia to eat out of hand there, a reminder of what real dried fruit (and nuts) tastes like to hold us till our next trip to Turkey.

More images from the road in central Anatolia: the very picture of cold, somewhere on the road between Kayseri and Aksaray, here; followed by the bluest blue-sky morning in Aksaray, here.

Missed Opportunities and Pide

You certainly wouldn't call Saray the friendliest pide salonu in Turkey. When we walked in, hungry after a morning of shopping on empty stomachs for edible souvenirs like rough bulgur pasta and split fava beans, the owner looked up from behind his desk and fixed us with an unsmiling stare, heaved a deep sigh and went back to his newspaper.

But the place smelled good, too good to walk back out of, like yeast and browning meat and cheese melting under a grill. A welcoming warmth (the weather had turned overnight; the previous day's harmless puffy clouds were now charcoal gray and what had been a cool breeze had morphed into a cutting wind hinting at snow) emanated from the wood oven on the back wall. And pide, lots and lots of pide were being made.

So we ignored the owner's diffidence and grabbed a couple of seats. A delivery order of 90-plus pide was being assembled on the table behind us. We took this as an encouraging sign.

It was our last morning in Tokat, a town in the southern reaches of Turkey's mid-Black Sea region that doesn't see a lot of tourists but should. Not necessarily because of its beauty -- Tokat is your average Anatolian town -- or because of its sights, which are relatively few, but because of its welcoming populace. When you first arrive Tokat feels closed and conservative. Give it half a day and the city opens its arms wide.

Regrets brought us back to Tokat, which we first visited eleven years ago. On that trip, in which we'd driven from the Mediterranean city of Antalya to Camlihemsin on the Black Sea, we'd squeezed too much into too little time. We hadn't yet learned to make room for serendipity by scheduling in plenty of slack days or to be willing to jetison a planned destination if a tempting alternative intervened.

That trip we met a smart, funny 16-year-old who walked us around town and invited us to his high school to sort-of teach an English class. The next morning we went and had a blast. All the kids wanted to invite us home for dinner. If we hadn't been so insistent on getting to Amasya before we hit Trabzon before we visited Camlihemsin we'd have enjoyed a dozen home-cooked meals in a dozen Tokat homes over the next few days. Instead we took to the road shortly after the class.

Stupid, stupid. STUPID.

This time around we half hoped we'd bump into our young friend, perhaps married now. Surely he'd recognize us (we yabanci don't all look alike, do we?) even if we probably wouldn't recognize him. That didn't happen of course, but we're nonetheless glad that the memory of meeting him all those years ago lured us back. On that first trip Tokat intrigued us. It still does. We know we'll return soon.

Tokat may not be beautiful in the way that Istanbul is. But it is ruggedly handsome, ringed by rocky crags and real mountains further out; from high up the views are dramatic. Kids climb around on those crags after school, and shepherds tend sheep.

There's a crumbling castle too, and stone-paved streets that wind uphill from the bustling "modern" main street. This is Old Tokat, an area of wood-frame brick houses and mansions. Some bear massive double timber doors with a pattern of two side-by-side "Z"s, one flipped in the reverse. Everyone acknowledges this pattern is a Tokat thing, but no one could tell us how or why it came to be.

Agricultural land laps at Tokat's edges and in autumn strings of drying vegetables and fruit festoon windows and walls and women in the Old City, many of whom belong to families who work their own farms, gather on a raised concrete slab at the upper reaches of the neighborhood, where they turn stalks of wheat into wheat berries and bulgur.

Tokat boasts a wonderful twice-a-week market with a koy section where village women sell pekmez and cheese and huge piles of herbs foraged in the hills. And craftsmen making saddles and harnesses by hand and blacksmiths who still pound shoes for horses and donkeys.

In Tokat everyone has time to talk; Dave and I must have drunk gallons of tea between us during dozens of conversations with Tokat-ans on everything from home cooking to the layout of traditional Tokat houses.

So by Day Three, our last day, we felt a warm friendly glow that enabled us to ignore the non-welcome from Saray's owner. We ordered our pides and a couple of chopped salads and admired Saray's lavender and yellow color scheme while we waited for our food.

Which was exceptional, really. There are pide and then there are pide and these pide bore the imprint of years of experience, good ingredients and a master's control of the wood-fired oven.

One arrived oozing scallion-flecked cheese, another spilling tender lamb minced with onion, tomato and long green chilies. Upper crusts were slicked with butter, bottoms were lightly scorched from the hot stones. Every bite held crispness and chewiness and the flavor of good fresh wheat came through. Indifferent ownership or not, we'll return to Saray.

After lunch we left town with regret, though this time it wasn't the sort of regret that comes from missed opportunities.

In case you missed it, Dave has put together a short multi-media on Istanbul's iconic ferry boats. Hop over here, click "play" and take a 4-minute vacation.

On the Turkey's Black Sea Coast, Autumn's Bounty

No doubt about it, we are very, very behind. Behind in posting from our autumnal travels in Turkey and from our rainy season time in Chiang Mai. And in posting from Hanoi, and Kelantan before that, and from Taiwan before that.

Where have the last five and a half months gone?

It's almost Thanksgiving (we'll be spending it in Chiang Mai, where we find ourselves once again). To make up for our absence, we're offering a great recipe for Turkey Day leftovers, and a story and slideshow to go along with it. Autumn's abundance on show in markets on Turkey's eastern Black Sea coast, and comfort food from Sinop: islama, an over-the-top dish of butter and broth-soaked lavash (or yufka) topped with turkey (or chicken) and crushed walnuts.

Jump to the story and slideshow, our latest for food and wine website Zester Daily, here.

(And it's still a great dish, even if Thanksgiving isn't in your near future.)

Kastamonu: Here's the Beef

Last January, en route from hamsi (anchovy) node Sinop to Ankara we made an 18-hour pitstop in Kastamonu, capital of the Turkish province of the same name. The sky was dull gray and the sub-zero wind unrelenting; by necessity our explorations were punctuated with stops in tea houses where we could thaw our frozen feet. Coal smoke hung in the air and soot coated buildings. Early Sunday morning, when we ventured out in search of caffeine, the streets were all but empty.

Still, there was something about Kastamonu that made us know we'd be back. Maybe it was the city's trove of crumbling old konak, or mansions, or its romantic situation on the slopes of two hills separated by a river, one hill crowned by the ruins of an 11th-century castle and the other by a late 1800s tower with a still chiming clock.

Perhaps it was the chorus of calls to prayer that we heard at dusk fas we watched a nearly full moon rise from the the courtyard of Ismail Bey mosque, high up one of Kastamonu's slopes. Or the thousands of starlings that appeared in the sky over the crest of the opposite hill right after, swooping and diving in wildly shifting formations.

It could have been dinner: superb kebabs that in their charred glory tasted all the better for being our first bites of meat after more than a week of eating primarily fish.

At any rate, we did return to Kastamonu last month, driving straight from Ankara's airport after a flight from Istanbul. We returned to the same Sunday market that we briefly lighted on in January -- and were treated to our first taste of this fall's hamsi catch -- and feasted on spit-roasted lamb in the nearby town of Taskopru, known for its garlic. We poked around the brick-paved streets in Kastamonu's market neighborhood, and found a good restaurant serving local dishes, including a version of etli ekmek ("meat bread") very different from the etli ekmek we ate last year in Mardin, in southeastern Turkey (a town which, coincidentally, is also built on a hill).

And we ate enough meat to fortify us for the self-imposed nothing-but-seafood diet we had planned for the next two weeks, which we would spend on the coast.

When one thinks of Turkish food it's lamb that most readily comes to mind. But in many parts of the country (like Kars) beef is the preferred red animal protein. Most of Kastamonu's kasab, or butchers, display not sheep but cow carcasses. And pastirma -- cured, air-dried beef -- is a local specialty.

In Kastamonu, beef, pastirma and garlic from Taskopru

Pastirma is usually associated with the eastern Anatolian city of Kayseri, where it is heavily flavored with garlic. Kastamonu's pastirma is also garlicky but less so. We know this because we carried some in our car for most of a day with minimal stink. A decade ago we bought some pastirma in Kayseri and attempted to do the same, but after two hours the interior of our car was so heavy with garlicky-ness that we were forced to pull over and eat the culprit.

In Kastamonu pastirma is preserved with and without an orange coating of ground seasonings -- garlic, fenugreek and paprika -- called cemen. The former is eaten as is while the latter is cooked into etli ekmek (which is then known as pastirmali ekmek), stewed with vegetables, or pan-fried with eggs.

Monday is beef delivery day in Kastamonu's pastirma/butcher area. Early in the morning we spotted men dressed in blood red uniforms unloading huge sides of beef from a truck. We followed them through a maze of passageways to a butcher shop, where we drank tea (of course) and chatted a bit with the shop's owner..

Kastamonu native Bayram Sari has owned his butcher shop, where he sells beef and his own pastirma and sucuk (sausage), for a little over 15 years. The enormous sides of beef hanging in his window are from Simmental, a breed of dairy and beef cow that can weigh up to 400+ kilos.

Bayram Bey makes his pastirma in a "secret" location about 45 minutes from downtown, he says. Curing is done from September to November, after summer has well and truly finished but before the worst of Kastamonu's bitter winter begins. To make the pastirma, beef loin and flank are rubbed with salt and air dried it for one to two months; the cemen coating is added after the meat is dried. Kastamonulu love their pastirma -- Bayram Bey figures he sells about 1.5 to 2 tons of the cured meat every year.

"That's no good," he said, pointing to a bag in my lap bearing the name of a pastirma shop next to the truck from which Bayram Bey's carcasses were being unloaded. "You have to try my pastirma!"

He had his shop assistant shave us a couple hundreds grams off a hunk in the display case. It was indeed delicious: not quite as dry as bresaola, supple and rich in flavor, tasting of beef first and then of garlic and spices. He also gifted us a few links of delicious sucuk which, with their hit of cumin, had me wishing for a soft corn tortilla. Go figure.

It's fair to say that when it comes to curing meat Bayram Bey is a maestro. After bidding him "Gorusuruz" (See you again -- and we will) we headed back to our hotel and packed our car for the drive to the coast.

We tucked the pastirma and sucuk into a bag with other edible souvenirs of Kastamonu -- sour plum fruit leather, "black" bulgur (coarse bulgur made from emmer, aka farro -- one of the province's specialty crops) and freshly harvested walnuts. Halfway to Inebolu the sun came out and we made an impromptu pitstop at cafe perched on a hilltop, where we refueled with tea, bread and Bayram Bey's pastirma (opening photo).

Philippine Duman: An Artisanal Product Par Excellence

It takes at least twelve hours to transform one 800 square-meter of rice into duman, a cool season specialty made in Pampanga, a Philippine province about an hour's drive north of Manila. We were lucky enough to observe the amazing production process. Read about it, and view Dave's slide show (be sure to go to full screen, and select captions) over at Zester Daily, a newish site devoted to the culture of food and wine.

While you're there, have a look around. Zester Daily was founded by a former LA Times reporter, benefits from the skills of seasoned editors, and counts some great writers and photographers among its contributors, You'll find us there at least once a month.

It's All About the (Goat) Girls

If you ever find yourself feeling ignored, unwanted, unloved, under-appreciated ... quick, get thee to a goat farm. I swear, no adulation or adoration in the world can match the intensity of that radiating from a gaggle of girl goats.

We got a dose of it a little over a year ago when we visited New Mexico's South Mountain Dairy. We met owners Donna Lockridge and Marge Peterson at the Saturday Santa Fe Farmer's Market, where they sell goat cheese made from milk sourced from their own goats. We asked if we could visit and watch the process.

What we didn't bargain for was falling in love with the 'girls'.

Unfortunately our timing was off; by the time we arrived much of the cheesemaking was finished. (The drive to Edgewood however, made up for that -- you never tire of looking at those vast expanses of turquoise New Mexico sky and a horizon of nothingness when you live in an Asian metropolis).

When we arrived Donna was cutting curds for chevre, which she would ladle into sieves and leave to drain for twenty-four hours (The whey collected in the process is given to feed a neighbor's pigs; in return, each year Donna and Marge get a whole butchered hog.)

We followed her around as she inspected her 'blooming rind' cheeses -- a brie and Mallapie Mist (above, similar to Humboldt Fog), and painted wax onto a cheese unique to South Mountain Dairy, a Dutch havarti-style semi-soft round called Chevarti (the wax inhibits mold and keeps the cheese moist).

We sampled cabre al vino, a semi-hard cheese soaked in red wine for 48 hours (below, and delicious), sqeaky-fresh goat cheese curds ("an accident," according to Donna, and a tasty one at that), and South Mountain's creamy, mild, and not-too-salty feta, which is handrubbed with salt instead of brined in salt solution.

Somewhere along the line Donna confessed to an aversion to strong-flavored cheeses -- no brie or Mallapie Mist for her.

It's obvious that Donna truly enjoys the cheesemaking, and the being-an-artisan parts of the business, like knowing by touch, rather than measuring PH level, that the Chevarti is dry enough to take the wax without absorbing it.

But she also made it clear where this business' priorities lay: "'We're doing the dairy just so we can keep the animals."

The title of this post, in fact, is also South Mountain Dairy's motto: "It's all about the girls."

The dairy, when we visited, had fifty 'girls' producing about 60 gallons of milk a day. South Mountain started in 2005 with 13, and Donna figured they'd be up to 64 by this year ("That's capacity -- determined by how much our equipment can handle," she told us.)

Like those cheese curds, the dairy was a bit of an accident.

Ten or so years ago Donna and Marge bought a couple of male goats as weed-eaters; later, they decided to raise pack goats.

They bought a couple does to build a herd, bred them, and bottle-fed the kids (they'd learned early in that the best pack goats are fed by bottle).

One problem -- the does produced too much milk for the babies to consume. What to do with the rest? Well -- make cheese, of course. But the milk made more cheese than Donna and Marge could eat, or give away to friends. So... years later, here they are.

After our tour of the product, we went out to meet the milk producers.

"Happy goats make happy cheese," says Donna. If judged by sheer conviviality South Mountain's goats must surely be among the happiest in the world.

As soon as we walked through the gate we were surrounded by curious beady-eyed beings. They teemed, their desire to be near us palpable, but not threatening. Exuding a sort of calm urgency, the girls got as close as they could, touching our hands and legs and arms, nudging but not butting, positioning their heads under our palms so we'd have no choice but to touch them.

 

"They're very sociable," Donna had told us. If anything that was an understatement. The girls didn't want anything from us but to be near us. I've never felt so popular in my life. When it was time to leave we had to tear ourselves away.

It was a pretty wondrous encounter, and we understood completely how owning two lawn-mowing goats could lead to a goat farm.

Not even Donna's sweet hound Butter could match the girls for loveableness.

South Mountain Dairy, 48 Katzima Road, Edgewood NM. 505/280-5210. Donna and Marge sell their cheeses at various farmer's markets around the state. NOTE: In the spring, when farm's bursting with cute little babies, they open up for tours. One dollar buys you a bottle and a chance to feed a baby goat.