EatingAsia

The Cheese Makers' Breakfast

This afternoon, deep in a jet-lagged comatose slumber, I dreamt of cows feasting in a flower-filled spring meadow, and of cheese made from their milk.

In actuality this wasn't so much dream as memory. A little over two weeks ago Dave and I were in Bogatepe, a village set on a high plateau in Kars, northeastern Turkey. Kars is known for two cheeses: gravyer and kaşar. Bogatepe is one of the province's two main gravyer-producing villages. We'd driven some 70 kilometers from the provincial capital to learn about the cheese and its history, and to see how it's made.

Forget everything you think you know about Turkish cheese. Gravyer isn't white or soft or feta-like. It isn't fresh and it isn't aged in a hide. Gravyer would be at home on a northern European table -- not a coincidence, because it was introduced to Kars over a hundred years ago from Switzerland via Russia. Though its name suggests gruyere, gravyer cheese is actually closer to emmental in appearance, texture and flavor: palest yellow with large irregular holes, medium soft, savory, not too salty and mildly nutty.

We spent a long evening and a morning at Koculu Gravyer Zavotu ("zavotu" is derived from the Russian for factory) which, like Bogatepe's other mandira (cheese workshops) -- there are seven in all, and the majority produce not gravyer but kaşar -- uses milk from cows in Bogatepe and a couple of nearby villages. During the three-month cheese-making season Koculu, which dates back to the early 19th century, produces on average three truck wheel-sized rounds of cheese a day, usually two at night and one in the morning. The entire cheese making process takes over five hours, from the time the peynir mayasi ("cheese yeast", or rennet) is poured into huge copper cauldrons of milk taken from the animals just hours before, to the initial pressing of the cheese wheels under a stone-weighted wooden beam.

After 24 hours the peynir ustasi (cheese "master") and his helpers remove the press and peel the rough fabric "clothing" from the new gravyer wheels. Before sending the cheeses off to the depo where they will bob in a salt brine, sweat in a hot room and ripen in a cool room for months, they smooth the surface of each by scraping with the side of a spoon and trim its edges with a sharp knife.

Nothing goes to waste in a mandira. Leftover whey, thick and milky, is turned into food for livestock and given to the village's dogs. The oil that seeps from the cheeses during their weighting and while they sweat in the hot room is collected and distributed to villagers; the women, we were told, apply it as a cream to their faces and hands. ("That's why women in Bogatepe look younger than those in other villages," our host Ilhan Koculu told us.)

And after a long night (the usta and his staff were still working on their second wheel when we left the mandira at 1:30am) followed by an early rise to make yet more cheese the cheese makers take a breakfast that includes those super-young gravyer scrapings and trimmings, all fried in a shocking amount of fresh village butter.

Beyond giving nourishment and energy (and to us gravyer nugget newbies,unspeakable pleasure), those cheese crisps help the cheese maker to predict the quality of his product. After frying up a batch Ilhan demonstrated a test by pulling one apart. He was pleased. Its crackly, deeply browned exterior and long, unbroken string predicted a sufficiently oily cheese of just-right softness.

"This will be a delicious gravyer," he said, pleased.

And then it was time for breakfast -- not just butter-browned cheese, but ethereally rich and thick kaymak, pekmez (grape molasses), helva, bread, olives and -- of course -- tea.

Cheese makers' breakfast: crispy cheese nuggets and kaymak with bread and pekmez

As the cheese makers sat down to eat scrapings from one of the season's earliest cheese, cows gorged on early wildflowers in a pasture just across the road. That evening, their milk would make another wheel of Bogatepe gravyer.

From Dave and I, many thanks to Ilhan Koculu and Cat Jaffee.

Süt Cenneti (Milk Heaven)

In Kars, made from milk: kaymakli koymak on the left, çeçil peyniri up top

Since arriving in Kars we've been swimming in milk.

This province, sidled up to Armenia in northeastern Turkey, is a cow-raising, milk-producing behemoth. In this part of Turkey, where the deep snow of long, hard winters gives way to impossibly lush, electric green pasturelands, hayvanlar (which means "animals" in Turkish -- but here in the northeast is more likely to mean "cows) are a source of barest sustenance and vast wealth. They give the meat that is eaten by some and the milk that is consumed in all forms, by everyone.

Cruising the streets of the capital city, which is also called Kars, we pass peynirci (cheese shops) after peynirci, their windows displaying mammoth wheels of emmenthal-like gravyer and stubby rounds of creamy yellow kaşar, a softer cheese with a mild cheddar-like butteriness.

Outside the city it's all dairy all the time, or so it has seemed to us -- heart-stopping, mind-blowingly rich and delicious foods made with the white stuff from the cow.

In villages, where most every household owns at least one cow and some own forty or fifty head, we never eat beef. Instead, there are slices of kaşar and loose piles of çeçil -- string cheese that's milky and springy when fresh and dry, salty and deliciously pungent when left to age and blue in an animal hide -- plus creamy-salty white village cheese. There is milk just hours from the cow, strained and warmed on wood fired stoves and, a milk a day from the cow, cultured into yogurt. There is fresh unsalted butter and kaymak, an impossibly unctuous, partially solidified cream whose taste often bears an intriguing bit of tang, to spread on bread. That kaymak in turn enriches many of the sweet and savory breads that accompany our cheeses. Sometimes there are wild greens plucked from spring meadows and brined in the whey left over from making cheese.

After a week swimming in milk, eating deep in a food culture dependent on the fat of the cow, we thought we'd reached the apex several times over. Then, in a village not far from the deserted Armenian city of Ani, we ate köymak. 

The recipe for köymak is simple: take the richest product of the cow -- kaymak -- and make it richer by placing it over a hot fire, bringing it to a boil and reducing it by half. Add flour, stir continuously until the flour browns and then add some water, bit by bit. Stir and stir and stir until the kaymak releases all of its oil -- which, of course, is essentially butter.

Serve your reduced dairy fat in a pool of its own butter in a bowl. Sprinkle with sugar. Spoon onto bread.

Enter the gates of süt cenneti.

It's a Man's World II: The Kars Sunday Grill

This is Sunday in Kars. Outside of the city, by the river and on hillsides, parked by the road, half-sheltered in the ruins of a church, hunkered beneath the castle -- groups of men, grilling.

Here and there are a few -- very, very few -- families (men, women, children) picnicing around their kebab-erias. But for the most part this is a man's world. On this day 95-98 percent of observed outdoor grillers and eaters are male. Here in Kars the American male's obsession with cooking protein over glowing embers is taken to a whole new level: women are excluded not only from the act of barbecuing, but from the enjoyment of the grill product as well. To a degree we've not yet observed elsewhere in Turkey.

What gives? Your guess is as good as ours.

We've been here in Kars since the middle of last week, heading out every morning to walk the area's stunningly beautiful electric green hills. We've broken our walks with plenty of tea breaks, thanks to the hospitable shephards and cowherds -- and yesterday, the hospitable manager of a hydroelectric power station -- we've met along the way.

The serious walking begins soon enough, when we embark on a multi-day hike. Food will feature prominently, in the villages we overnight in. Tune in next week for a taste of yöresel ev yemeği (regional home cooking).