EatingAsia

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).

Suitable for Framing II: Famous Garlic and a Market

Famous Taşköprü garlic, Turkey, October 2011

Market in Mardin, Turkey, June 2010

This is the second post in a series that we're running every Tuesday through early December.All images in the series are for sale, via Photoshelter or directly from Dave.

To learn more about the series visit the first post, here. Images can be viewed full screen in Dave's Suitable for Framing gallery, here.

About the photographer:

David Hagerman is an editorial and commercial photographer specializing in food, travel, portraiture and street photography. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Saveur, Food & Wine, Travel+Leisure Southeast Asia, Wall Street Journal and other publications.When not on assignment or otherwise gainfully occupied Dave offers private photography workshops in Penang and elsewhere. Contact him at [email protected].

Come for the Kaymak, Stay for the Kebab

 

We were one hundred percent on vacation when we drove into Mardin, Turkey in early June. But a chance encounter led us to a story. Our article on this ancient southeastern city's bid to become the region's capital of art and culture was published in last Sunday's New York Times Travel Section; you can read it here.

Mardin's lanes are linked by abarra, vaulted passageways

Mardin is a historically and architecturally rich city that sees few foreign visitors, despite the fact that it's fantastically popular with domestic tourists who descend in throngs on the weekend. I hope our article inspires a few more yabanci to visit.

If you ever make do make it to this intriguing little town, you'll need some sustenance. As you might expect, we've got a recommendation.

On our first morning in town a tiny kebab shop near Mardin's food market and just below its main street, Cumhuriyet Caddesi beckoned -- not with a smoking grill, but a window display of kaymak.

Maybe you've heard of kaymak, which is often described as "Turkish clotted cream". It's difficult to visit Turkey and not be converted to kaymak. In the weeks leading up to this last visit the word "kaymak" came up in conversation between Dave and I at least 10 times a day.

Kaymak is made by skimming or "lifting" the cream that rises to the surface of boiling milk. What we didn't realize until this trip is that it has regional variations.

In western Turkey the best kaymak is made with high-butterfat water buffalo milk and comes in thick slabs rolled up like a jelly sponge. In Kars kaymak is made with cow's milk, and the result is semi-liquid, like whipping cream. The kaymak we ate in Van, made from sheep's milk, took the form of half centimeter-thick sheets with lightly bubbled surfaces, something like an Indian appom or the raw side of an American-style pancake before it's flipped.

In Mardin paper-thin, almost translucent sheets of kaymak made from goats milk resemble no dairy product I've ever seen. Arranged in layers on shallow plates like yufka or phyllo awaiting transformation into a borek or baklava, they drew us into a kebab shop where we ordered one to share (and ended up with two).

 

The kebabci (kebab seller) cut each of our kaymak into rough pieces, doused them with serbet or sugar water and served them with bread. Our kaymak were creamy in the middle and crackly at the edges, and bore just a whiff of goatiness -- a good thing in my opinion, to balance their dairy richness. In short, they were spectacular. We barely touched the bread, and got up to leave assuming we'd be back the next morning for more.

 

But on the way out we passed the kebabci mincing a gargantuan mound of lamb with his long curved knife. Something in the way that he took his time, mincing and remincing while adding a bit of salt or crushed red pepper now and again, suggested that this guy might be an usta, or 'master'. It became apparent that we wouldn't be returning the next day for breakfast, but later that same day. For lunch.

 

When we returned around 12:30 the little shop was filled with smoke, and our kebabci was doing a bang-up business. While he slid chunks of lamb and tail fat onto some skewers and shaped chopped meat into kofte around others, a helper grilled

 

while another assembled.

 

Delivery orders were stacked on a counter top and we had to wait a good half hour or so for our meals, as customers sharing the small counter with us (total seats: about 9) dug in.

 

The product justified the wait.

 

Our izgara kofte (grilled lamb logs) were perfectly seasoned, a bit heavy on the crushed red pepper and aci (spicy) as per our request, crusty and charred outside but very moist within. Once again I left my bread aside (except for the bit that had been moistened with lamb drippings) to concentrate on the star of the show.

Accompanied by a sweet little salad plate of onions soured with sumac, tomatoes, and springy parsley our gorgeous grilled lamb almost made us forget about the kaymak. (Almost)

A kebab and kofte usta indeed.

Kebab shop, on the lane between Cumhuriyet Market and Cumhuriyet Caddesi, Mardin. Morning through afternoon. Closed Sunday.

It's A Man's World

James Brown certainly wasn't describing the Turkish çay evi (tea house) when he crooned those four words, but he could have been. Even in Istanbul -- but especially in Turkey's more conservative east -- the çay evi is a cultural artifact claimed by males. It's run by men, staffed by men (and often boys, who work as tea runners, delivering orders beyond the tea house), and frequented by men. 

In the east çay evi are everywhere, two or three to a city block. Tea houses are community halls, gossip nodes, places where men come together with their friends. They're where backgammon and cards (and other games that we're not familiar with) are played and TV is watched.

   

They're where buyers and sellers gather to compare purchases and sales after a morning at the market.

They're where a prayer bead maker might set up shop and a watch seller peddle his wares.

Turkish tea houses are also spots for solitary pursuits: a bite of breakfast, an hour or three of silent contemplation. They're where, if you are a retired Turkish gentleman, you might go to get away from the house, because the house is where the women are. You might call the çay evi an extension of the living room, if Turkish families were made up of nothing but men and boys.

 

 

I can't claim to be in tune with a culture that dictates that a goodly portion of its population spend the majority of its time inside the house. But it is what it is. We fell hard for eastern Turkey, and we especially love its çay evi. 

As a woman I rarely felt unwelcome in a tea house -- but then again I'm a yabanci, or foreigner, and I was accompanied by a male. (I'm also "of a certain age", which in Asia and Turkey commands a respect, deference, and certain amount of courtesy that it doesn't in the United States.)

And the weather was fine so we often sat outside, especially if a çay evi was crowded. If ordering required walking inside, Dave would take care of it. He payed for our tea most of the time (when we weren't being treated -- that happened often.). And invariably if one of the men wanted to chat he'd turn to  Dave first.

I spent a fair amount of time pondering this as we made our way around eastern Turkey, this "tea house as man's world" thing and my place in it. I am a strong woman, I think, who's never thought of herself as anything but equal to men. Yet here I was retreating to the background, allowing Dave to test the waters in a tea house before we decided whether or not to drink there, sitting outside so as not to offend, so sensitive to appearances that I'd avoid paying for my own tea if I could.

And yet -- some of our best, most memorable encounters in eastern Turkey took place in tea houses. Once a customer figured out that it was I, not Dave, with whom he could communicate the conversation flowed. And flowed. That I was a woman seemed to be a non-issue (or maybe, as a yabanci I am a sort of undefinable 'non-woman'.)

(As an aside, all of this tea house conversation made me wish that women in eastern Turkey had gathering places similarly accessible to travelers -- because the one thing I lacked, and wished for, on this trip were more opportunities to talk to women.)

We spent hours in (and on stools in front of) tea houses. Beautiful old tea houses with sweeping views of the Syrian plains in Mardin.

Newer, characterless tea houses with pleasant outdoor courtyards in Van. A cubbyhole of a tea house in Gaziantep, where we watched the owner assemble an order of 25 glasses in about 3 minutes.

 

In çay evi we learned that -- unlike American cafes and Malaysian coffee shops -- it's quite OK to bring in outside food and drink.

That laying your glass on its side when you've finished means you've had enough, and that turning it upside down means the tea wasn't good.

That Erzurumlu like a slice of lemon in their tea.

That in the east the sugar cube goes not in the glass, but under your tongue or just inside your bottom lip (like chewing tobacco) or between your lips, to be melted with each sip. (Sugar cubes in the east are also harder and denser.)

That the only man allowed in the tea maker's cubicle -- besides the tea maker -- is Ataturk.

That for us, "Cay içer misiniz?" ("Will you drink some tea?") are among the three most evocative words in the Turkish language.

For more glimpses of Turkey hop over to Sky Blue Sky, where Dave has posted some lovely portraits he shot in the strange little southeastern town of Midyat. View it here.