EatingAsia

Breakfast, Siem Reap

First post of the year. First meal of the day.

We're in Siem Reap for our second food photography and writing workshop with journalist, cookbook author and writing coach Dianne Jacob. While the rest of the group is off with Dave photographing markets and visiting small producers of rice noodles and rice wine I thought I'd take a moment to tell you about what I think might just be Siem Reap's most underrated breakfast.

Chinese culinary influence runs through all of the cuisines of south east Asia, less visibly so perhaps in Thailand, Laos and Cambodia (we tend to forget that stir-fried rice noodles are not local 'inventions' but local permutations of a Chinese dish). So it is with rice porridge -- jook, congee, zhou, however you know it. We eat it in Malaysia (Chinese and Malay versions), they eat it in Indonesia (bubur) and Thailand (khao tom) and Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam too. 

This Cambodian rice porridge is very Teochew -style  -- not thick and starchy but loose and a bit watery, not a meal in itself but a base for condiments and flavorings. Some might be underwhelmed with this fashion of porridge. I certainly was, at first; I missed the thickness and creaminess of Hong Kong jook. But I've come to love it because -- and this is important in a breakfast dish, I think, because we all wake up with differently sized appetites -- it can be whatever you want it to be: light and austere and all about the rice, easy on the stomach ... or big, bold and brassy. 

At this stall near Kandal Village (aka Hup Guan Street, a compact little cache of boutiques and shops, restaurants and cafes and Siem Reap's best western-style coffee, at The Little Red Fox) two graceful older Cambodian ladies serve rice porridge for breakfast only, starting at around 6 or 6:30am. By the time we arrived at 8:30 they'd turned off the fire beneath the porridge. That was fine with us, because right about now Siem Reap's daytime temperature hovers around 90 to 95F. 

We added sieng chha or fermented soy beans --- what we know in Malaysia as taucu, but tastier here, the individual beans distinct and holding their shape, not al dente but not a sticky mush, and shot through with crunchy strips of zesty ginger. And chhai pov, translucent crispy slices of pickled daikon, plus salted eggs preserved just long enough to firm up the white but not so long as to obliterate the unctuousness of the yolk. The rice, though plain, has flavor too, a subtle almost-grassiness -- a soft and low bass to sharp, high notes of crunch and salt. 

Though we love the pork rice and pickles served at Siem Reap's Psar Chas (Central Market), this underrated porridge looks set to become our go-to breakfast here in Siem Reap.

Two Ladies' breakfast porridge, early morning to about 9am. From Hup Guan Street, follow the narrow alley right next to the shop called Trunkh; their stall is at the end. Thanks to Doug for the tip.

For the visually inclined, Dave Instagrams breakfast and everything else in Siem Reap and beyond at @DaveHagerman. And I continue to post his photos -- and interesting links, updates etc -- on the EatingAsia Facebook page.

Recipe

Orange-Scented Baked Pears with Marsala

Beat 1 overdue cookbook manuscript with a good dose of post-food writing and photography workshop exhaustion to produce a high state of anxiety.

Transfer to a modest AirBnB rental with a view in northern Italy. Add a good kitchen, superior ingredients and enough red wine at dinner to produce a soundless sleep. Leave aside to rest for 24 hours.

On a lightly floured work surface, press into the loose shape of a schedule of hours of intense work interspersed with brief bursts of exercise and nutritious meals. Set aside for another 48 hours.

On Day 4, turn the oven to 325F and place a rack in the middle.

Stir together 2 cups Marsala with 1/2 to 3/4 cup sugar in a medium-sized (12 to 14 inches long) oval baking dish. Add several strips of orange peel (make sure to remove any white pith) and arrange as many firm pears in the dish as will comfortably fit without touching.

Bake the pears, basting every 20 to 30 minutes, until the Marsala mixture sauce reduces by half and the pears wrinkle and begin to collapse, 2 hours or so.

While the pears are baking move your computer to within 6 feet of the stove and, as the sweet scent of fortified wine and autumn fruit fills the kitchen, cut and paste and cut and paste again, and type type type, all the while repeating to yourself that you will finish. And that it is good.

Serve the pears warm or cooled, on their own or with pouring cream, Greek-style thick yogurt, creme fraiche or vanilla ice cream. They are also excellent cold, straight from the fridge. Leftover sauce? Spread it over buttered toast, like honey.

Readers in Australia Your Marsala may not be my Marsala (see Ross' comment, below). If that's the case substitute red wine, as in the note below.

Note You can substitute red wine for the Marsala, in which case you might want to increase the sugar by a few tablespoons and add a couple of cloves and a short length of cinnamon stick.

 

 

On Pursuing an Obsession and Getting Nowhere, Until You Do: Me and Palm Sugar

     Recommended palm sugar delivery vehicle: gula Melaka ice cream at China House, George Town

     Shortly after moving to Malaysia ten years (!) ago, Dave and I became obsessed with palm sugar. At first it was the attraction of the new. We'd lived in Thailand and had eaten Thai palm sugar, but gula Melaka -- the coconut palm sugar most common to Malaysia -- was so much ... MORE than any Thai palm sugar we'd ever tasted. More color, more smokiness, more butterscotch and caramel notes, more flavor ... more more more.

     Back then Dave had a regular corporate job and I was a newbie food writer, working on our blog (which also celebrates its 10th anniversary shortly. Unbelievably.) and working up the nerve to begin pitching editors. Travel was dictated by holidays and Dave's vacation time, but it was travel independent of work, determined by where we wanted to go and what we wanted to eat, not by the success (or not) of a pitch.

     So, we travelled for palm sugar. We went to Medan and found a guide and spent a morning with a Batak family of palm sugar makers, listening to tales of prayer before palm tapping and eating whole pumpkins cooked in bubbling palm sap. From there we drove further west into Sumatra and, one morning before dawn, tracked a palm tapper to his trees to see how he collected his sap. We travelled to Padang, and from there to Bukittingi where, in the market (is it still there? we haven't been since the big earthquake on Sumatra a few years ago) we found a stall selling more than 40 palm and cane sugars from 40 different villages. In Malaysia we drove south to Malacca and then from there to a village outside of Muar, where a palm sugar producer and his two (Sumatran) workers showed us how palm sap is boiled down and poured into bamboo molds to produce Malaysia's finest sweet (as far as I'm concerned, and I do eat it like candy). We flew to Sarawak, where we found liquefied palm sugar sold in plastic bags hung from nails in myriad sundry shops in Kuching, and delicious flower-shaped sweets soaked in the sugar syrup. We went to Bali, where in Munduk a tapper and palm sugar maker told us, after he'd poured his sap into the wide pan in which it would be boiled down to sugar syrup, that no one speaks to a tapper who's transporting his syrup from tree to pan because that will spoil the sugar.

    What did we learn? That palm sugar is made from many palms. That palm sugars vary in taste and color according to palm, terroir and the skill and method of the sugar producer. That palm sugar can be smoky or sour or butterscotch or caramel-y, that it can taste floral or evince hints of coffee and chocolate. That it can be many of those things. That there is SO MUCH misinformation out there about palm sugar: that it's made from coconut milk or coconut water (it's not), that it's made by tapping the trunk of a palm tree (it's not), that it's made with or from white cane sugar (it shouldn't be, and if it is it is not palm sugar), that gula java = gula merah = gula aren = gula apong = gula Melaka (no, no, no, no).

     After our discoveries we were so fired up about palm sugar that we carried dozens of pounds of the stuff to the USA, where we staged tastings in Chicago and San Francisco. Tasters were amazed, and enthusiastic. People really want to know about palm sugar! we thought. 

     Then I tried to pitch palm sugar stories. One editor told me that Americans who were just getting to grip with galangal couldn't be expected to wrap their minds around palm sugar. Another liked the idea, but the publication in question had run another sugar story in the preceding few years. Mostly, no publications were interested. And so we set our little palm sugar obsession aside, and moved on to other topics. (We kept eating palm sugar, though.)

     Then, almost two years ago I was contacted by Darra Goldstein, for whom I'd written book reviews when she was Editor-in-chief of the food studies journal Gastronomica. She was commissioning entries for the Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, and she wondered if I would write about -- TA DA! Palm Sugar. (I have no idea how Darra knew about me and palm sugar. I should ask.) 

     The volume was published this spring. Almost 15 years after palm sugar gripped my imagination my obsession had come full circle. (I was also chuffed to get the George Town bakery that makes the best coconut tarts in all of Asia listed in the book's Pastry Shops appendix.)

     Of course, I'd still love to see a big palm sugar spread featuring Dave's gorgeous photos in a food glossy (are there any of those left? that pay real money?), but I'm honoured to have two entries (the other is on Asian Sticky Rice Sweets) in a formidable reference work like the Companion.

    My editor at Oxford University Presss suggested that I reprint my palm sugar entry here, with an eye to drumming up sales for the book. (Note: I do not receive royalties from sales. I was paid in books for my contributions.) I am happy to oblige, at the very least to spread the gospel of palm sugar (The Real Story).

     Do I need to tell you that, if you are at all interested in global food -- and especially sweets --  this volume NEEDS to be on your shelf? Let me titillate with a few entries, chosen at random: baba au rhum, child labor, cupcakes, fudge, golden syrup, the Good Humor Man, jelly beans, pudding, rasgulla, the American south, tres leches cake. I've been reading my copy in bits and pieces before bed. It's a lot of fun.  Order yours here. And if you are travelling to southeast Asia -- save some luggage space for palm sugar! 

-----

Reprinted with permission from The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Palm sugar is one of the world’s oldest sweeteners, distinguished from cane sugar in Singhalese chronicles dating from the first century b.c.e. It is produced and consumed across a swath of Asia stretching from the Philippines to India and Sri Lanka. For anyone accustomed to thinking of sugar as either white or brown and just plain sweet, palm sugar is surprising in its complexity, ranging in color from pale yellow to almost black and with a flavor that, in addition to sweet, can be salty, sour, bitter, smoky, or any combination thereof.

Palm sugar is produced by boiling sap collected from the cut inflorescence of many palm varieties, including palmyra (Borassus flabellifer), coconut (Cocos nucifera), kithul or fishtale (Caryota urens), date (Phoenix dactylifera), silver date (Phoenix sylvestrus), aren (Arenga pinnata), and nipa (Nypa fruticans) palms. Prior to cutting, the inflorescence is softened by beating with a stick or mallet to initiate the flow of sap. The sap is captured in tubes suspended beneath the cut inflorescence and collected twice a day; tappers often add a fermentation prohibitor such as lime, calcium carbonate, or tannic bark. Some tappers and sugar makers (often one and the same individual) include a ritual as part of the sap collection process. On northern Sumatra, ethnic Batak, most of whom are Christian, request permission from God before collecting sap. On Bali, it is believed that if the tapper speaks with or is spoken to by anyone while transferring collected sap to the pan where it is to be boiled, the sugar will become spoiled.

Once collected, the sap is reduced by evaporation, boiled and stirred for several hours in large, uncovered cauldrons. During boiling, some makers add ingredients to alter the color of their sugar; for example, Batak add the spongy reddish fiber that lines the inside of mangosteen peels to make their product darker. Once the sap has been sufficiently reduced, usually to a viscosity somewhere between the soft- and hard-ball candy stage, it is poured into molds made from coconut halves, bamboo tubes, strips of rattan joined to form a circle, and other materials, and left to cool and solidify. See stages of sugar syrup. In southern Thailand, the sugar is whipped with large whisks until it is stiff, then formed without the use of molds into lumps or swirl-topped mounds and left to dry. In Sarawak and Sabah states on Malaysian Borneo and on Sri Lanka, the sugar is taken from the fire when still liquid, allowed to cool, and then poured into jars, tubs, or bags.

In local languages palm sugar might be named for its color (gula merah or “red sugar” in Indonesia); its traditional provenance (gula jawa in Indonesia, gula Melaka in Malaysia); the variety of palm from which it is made (gula nipa and gula aren in Indonesia, gula apong or “floating sugar” on Malaysian Borneo, in reference to the nipa palm, which grows in water); or the sugar-making process (pakaskas in the Philippines from kaskasin, which refers to the process of “scraping” the sugar from the boiling sap). Palm sugar is duong thot not in Vietnamese and scor thnout in Khmer. In India, it is called gur or, confusingly, date sugar (whether or not it is made from date palms) or jaggery, a word that also refers to dark brown cane sugar.

No matter which palm it is made from, palm sugar has a lower glycemic index and is less sweet than cane sugar. The palm sap that becomes sugar has also long been used to make intoxicating toddy and distilled arak, as well as vinegar. Palm sugar is an ingredient in a staggering variety of sweet and savory foods, from Thai somtam (green papaya salad) to innumerable Indian sweets.

Bibliography:

Grimwood, Brian E. Coconut Palm Products: Their Processing in Developing Countries. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 1975.

Moody, Sophy. The Palm Tree. London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1864.

 

I Don't Like Brains

    Deconstructed sheep's head with the traditional dusting of dried wild thyme

    One of the reasons I like living in Penang is that when folks booking a street food walk make a special request it's never for dishes featuring bugs or sheep balls. Food here on the island is not 'weird' or 'bizarre' (though I suppose duck blood cubes, a component of some versions of curry mee might be considered 'out there'). So when I head out the door in the morning I never have to worry that today's walk will be all about how many edible oddities we'll be consuming instead of the ingredients and food, its back story and the people who make it.

    I have nothing against offal -- working on our Turkish cookbook has turned me into a liver lover. Grilled gizzards are fab, tripe definitely has a place in Malay beef vermicelli soup and I do like blood cubes on occasion (always in northern Thailand, where they tend to be chewy and a bit smoky flavored). But I have been over travelers questing after the weirdest local food they can find since the year it became A Thing.  

    Placing the chase after the fifth quarter, or bugs, or unhatched duck eggs above all else blinds us to so much that is not known about a cuisine (outside of its home) -- and that never will be known about a cuisine because it doesn't rate the 'unusual' tag.

     Consider the Philippines, and the adventuring food travelers and writers who've visited and come away blabbering about balut and blood stew but never about sinigang, one of the country's most beloved and oft-eaten dishes. Or Turkey, where lists of must-eats invariably include chicken breast pudding -- (Chicken! In a sweet dish! So crazy!) -- but not the humble kuru fasulye, a national soul food if ever there was one.

    The flipside to my disdain (can you feel it?) for this weirdest-first manner of approaching cuisines is that I can be guilty of veering too much the other way. For instance: we were 16 months in Turkey researching our cookbook, but it was not until the last days of our final month in country that I tried kelle tandir, or roasted sheep's head.

    Turks love kelle, be it boiled and served cold, roasted and served warm or cooked in a soup. Kelle tandir is quite big in Sivas city (Sivas is both a city and a province; Turkish provinces share names with their capital cities), where every morning we passed several shops famed for their wood fire oven-roasted sheep heads, the mahogany skulls staring out of warmed display cases like sentries. In Sivas kelle is breakfast fare. I regret never trying it there. (In my defense, after big dinners in private homes comprising an often obscene number of dishes I could rarely summon a real appetite before noon. Also, few to no American home cooks are going to cook sheep's head in a wood-fired oven, so I wasn't compelled learn how to make it for the book.)

    So when two chef friends invited us to join them for a lunch of roasted sheep's head on one of our last days in Istanbul we accepted. The venue was a well-known shop in the Fish Market off Istiklal Caddesi. Service was swift; within 5 or so minutes of placing our order we each had a plate of head.

    I had expected the kelle to be served whole; I was looking forward to using my fingers to pull the tender meat from the skull the way you pull crispy skin from a whole roast chicken. ('For fish and kelle the best utensils are fingers,' a Turkish friend says). Instead it arrived deconstructed, brain (at 5 o'clock in the photo up top) and eyeball (7 o'clock) scooped onto the plate (1 serving is half a head). I had also looked forward to sampling brain (my first ever), which one of our chef friends talked up as we waited for our meal.

    Well. The meat and crispy skin were delicious, especially eaten dusted with a bit of dried wild thyme. If you like the taste of lamb you'll enjoy roast kelle. The eyeball -- meh. Chewy and springy but not a lot going on in the taste department. The brain? A big disappointment. I'd imagined spreading it on bread and savoring it like pate or lardo. It was fatty, unctuous in texture and exceedingly rich. But where was the flavor? If I'm going to eat pure fat I'd rather it be shmaltz, or the charred strip of fat that limns a nice grilled steak.

    What can I say? I don't like brain. (For what it's worth, Dave does. He devoured his.) I left most on my plate (for my friend to eat), saving room and calories for dessert at the pastane several doors down.

Kelle tandir, at Sahne Sokak 18, Balikpazari (Fish Market), Beyoglu. Till 6pm. 

Please Don't Call It 'Turkish Pizza'

   

    At the end of January, on our last day in Istanbul before flying to the USA, we lunched at Kadikoy institution Halil, producer of a quite spectacular lahmacun. Lahmacun, if you don't know it, is basically a wood oven-cooked flatbread with a thin shmear of spicy meat paste.

    'Turkish pizza', some call it -- but why? Yes, lahmacun and pizza share a composition of dough with  topping. They are both baked. There the similarity ends.

    I understand the desire to make familiar unfamiliar foods. Really, I do. I struggle with it as I write recipes  for this Turkish cookbook Dave and I are working on. While some dishes in the book (hummus, dolma, cacik or yogurt with cucumber) will no doubt be familiar even to those who've never traveled to Turkey, others -- dried corn and collard greens soup and black-peppery bulgur orbs swimming in oregano-flecked yogurt sauce, for instance -- will likely be unknown even to many of those who have.

    Some cooks (and cookbook buyers) are excited by unfamiliar dishes. Others are put off. I don't want anyone to look at my book and be put off, not least because I'm convinced that this food is Really, Really Good.

    So how do I convince the timid cook to go beyond his or her comfort zone? Should I resort to what I'll call the Turkish Pizza Method and call a dish what it is not in order to convince readers that they will be cooking and eating something familiar when in fact they won't?

    That loose, almost soupy herb, yogurt and bulgur dish --- maybe I should call it a 'risotto' because it's a dish of grains cooked with sort-of liquids that, like a true risotto, ends up spoon-able and creamy and so delicious that you can't stop eating it. Maybe I should name it a 'risotto' because that might convince cooks for whom the combination of yogurt and bulgur would otherwise give pause.

    No. I don't think so.

    'Don't pander,' my editor said to me when we met a few weeks ago to swoon over Dave's photographs, talk recipes and ponder design and cover shots. (Cover shots! Yes, it's all seeming very real now.)

    A chickpea durum (flatbread wrapped around chickpeas and herbs) is not a 'Gaziantep burrito'. Ayran is not a 'Turkish smoothie'. Manti is not 'Turkish ravioli'. (It is a Turkish dumpling.) Simit is not a 'Turkish bagel'.  And if you follow my recipe for that bulgur, herb and yogurt dish? Well, you won't end up with a 'risotto'.

    The problem with the Turkish Pizza Method of describing and naming dishes is that it often ends up distorting the final product. Set a Google alert for 'Turkish restaurant' and you'll see photographs of lahmacun -- usually described on menus as 'Turkish pizza' -- that would make a Turkish eater from the south east (where it originates) cry. Thick discs of pale dough burdened by way too much chunky meat, sometimes cheese -- this is what the non-Turkish diner expects when a menu item reads 'Turkish pizza'. And all too often, even in restaurants owned by Turks (and even in Turkey! see Sultanahmet/Istanbul Old City), this is what a lahmacun is.

    This is what a lahmacun should be (with some regional variation): about 60 grams of sturdy dough rolled into a thin disc, lightly spread with two or so tablespoons (sometimes even less -- see the dough peeking crust peeking through the topping in that photo up top?) of meat minced to a true paste with chili, some onion and perhaps other seasonings, baked in a super-hot oven (wood-fired, preferably) until it's blistered on the bottom. The way Halil makes it, a lahmacun's bottom crust cracks as you fold it in thirds over stems of parsley anointed with a few drops of lemon.

    Lahmacun is lahmacun. I'm convinced that anyone reading this post would adore this Turkish dish prepared as it is in its native place. It's even easy to pronounce -- LAH-mah-joon. There will be a recipe in our book. I won't call it 'Turkish Pizza'. 

Halil Lahmacun, Güneşli Bahçe Sokak (in the market area across from the ferry terminal), Kadikoy, Istanbul. Silly cheap. Enjoy your lahmacun with a glass of fresh ayran. 

Happy Year of the Goat

  A bad hair day in Rize, on Turkey's Black Sea coast

     Best wishes for a prosperous, happy and healthy Year of the Goat (or Sheep)!

    We were not here much during the Year of the Horse -- I count something like 10 posts for 2014. It's not as if we don't have an excuse -- we've spent five of the last 11 months in Turkey collecting recipes, stories and photographs for our forthcoming cookbook. When we've not been in Turkey I've been immersed in recipe development and writing, leaving little time or energy for this space. (If you ever wonder where we are, check Dave's Instagram feed.)

    But I miss writing here, and I hope to be here more often in the coming months.

    In the meantime, a few bits of news. Though we're spending about half our time in Turkey, Penang is still home. So for this month's issue of Travel+Leisure Southeast Asia I wrote on what I love about living in George Town .... and why I know the UNESCO world heritage site will not be home forever. It's a slightly bittersweet feature story, accompanied by soulful photos by David Hagerman. Here's a link to a PDF.

    On a brighter note, for this weekend's New York Times Travel Section Asia seafood roundup  I wrote a little ode to Penang's spicy-sweet-sour-fishy asam laksa, my very favourite Malaysian dish.

Pile of goats on the road to Malatya, Turkey

    After Christmas in Cambodia (articles forthcoming), a wintery month in far eastern Turkey and yet more winter in Boston and NYC we're now in New Mexico, where I've commandeered my parents' kitchen to continue developing recipes for the book. My folks don't have particularly adventurous palates, so I am excited that they seem to be truly loving the dishes from Turkey that I've been preparing for them.

    Last night's Sanliurfa-style yaprak pirzola ("leaf" lamb chops) -- flattened chops smeared with a delicious spicy marinade and grilled -- were especially popular. All of this love from my harshest critics (I don't get a pass because I'm their offspring!) for the foods of eastern Turkey -- so many of which are unknown beyond Turkey's borders, yet ingredients for which I was able to find even out here, in the American southwest -- bodes well for the book. At least I like to think so.

    To hone my recipes I've been working with a small corps of testers since late last summer. In another 1 or 2 months I'll be putting out a call for additional recipe testers. So if trying out 2 or 3 dishes from eastern Turkey and/or Istanbul is something you'd be interested in keep an eye on this space and/or on the EatingAsia Facebook page.

    Eventually I'll begin putting up recipes here on the blog.

    Finally, next October Dave and I will be partnering with writing coach, editor, journalist and author of Will Write for Food (and two pizza books) Dianne Jacob on a 3 1/2-day / 4-night food+travel photography and writing workshop in the beautiful town of Alacati, one hour from Istanbul by air. (How good is Dianne? She coached me to a winning book proposal.)

    We have 5 spaces left for the workshop, which takes place less than four miles from the Aegean Sea and includes group instruction, private coaching, lots of hands-on practice with your camera, a cooking class, a day-long excursion to one of Turkey's largest once-a-week farmer's markets and -- needless to say -- lots of fabulous food and drink. It will be an intense few days -- but lots of fun too.

    For more details head over to the workshop website, here.

    In the meantime, Dave has put together a slideshow illustrating 12 tips for making beautiful food photographs -- a tiny taste of techniques he'll be focusing on in the workshop.

Majestic goat, Lake Van, Turkey

 

 

Fourty-Four Hands. Twelve Hundred Udders.

    We heard it before we saw it, a high-pitched whine originating from somewhere a mile or so up the road. On a cloudless evening Dave and I were driving back to Van after a day exploring back roads to the south of the lake. It was mid-June, the start of yayla season, when villagers take their sheep and goats -- or send them with hired shepherds -- to high pasture. Earlier, descending from a craggy peak where we'd hiked through new grass and skirted clumps of leftover snow we saw signs of a shepherd's camp: upturned milk pails left to dry on the banks of a stream. Further on, we'd pulled off the road to give way to an elderly man, his wife and their son leading a hundred or so sheep, a few goats and several dogs to their summer camp.

    As we dropped to lake level there was a hum, then a whine, then a piercing vibrato that shimmered on the air. We stopped the car and stared hard out at the foothills across the plateau. Ever so gradually small shifting shapes came into view. We realized that we were hearing the bleets and blehs of many sheep and goats.

    We left the car, and after picking our way across a boggy marsh we were in the thick of it: sheep and goats and a dozen beautiful loping kangal dogs and what seemed to be an entire village, all assembed for the task that bookends the days during cheese-making season.

    Twenty-two women sat facing each other on low stools set three yards apart, forming a chute or tunnel into which four shepherds wrestled and herded twelve hundred animals. Astride a boulder in the middle, his head barely cresting the sea of jostling woolly beasts, a herder grabbed necks and horns and ears and shoulders, pulling and pushing the animals to his left and his right as he steered them to their owners.

    Splashes of green, purple, red, yellow and blue paint on the animals' backs told to which woman they belonged, but the milkers kept up a chorus -- Mine! Mine! Here! Here! — as sheep and goats streamed through the chute. They clamped their fists around legs and haunches and tails, roughly pulling their animals to them and bringing them close over pails set between their ankles.  A few deft squeezes of each teat and it was over, the animals jumping and springing away to their escape. When a woman ended up with a sheep or goat not her own she released it with a shout to the three young shepherds standing at the tunnel's exit; it was their job to wrestle the poor animal back to the starting gate.

    Milking is exhausting work and in most eastern Anatolian villages it's done by women. As these women worked, their daughters, daughters-in-law, sisters and elderly mothers stood behind them, ready to pour the fresh milk through cloth-lined syphons into 5-liter metal cans.

    The milkers' necks were thick, their shoulders broad, their wrists and forearms hard and muscled. Their hands were black from the mud beneath them and the dirt and oil on the animals’ fur. They sweated and grunted with their labors. They joked and laughed and razzed each other too.

    Each day during cheese season, the muhtar (village headman) told me as we stood watching this incredibly physical endeavor, the village's combined animals -- 1200 to 1300 in all -- yield a little over 250 gallons of milk (sheep produce much less milk than cows, and their milk is higher in fat).

    Each woman milks her animals twice a day, and then carries the milk across the marsh to the village, where with the help of other women in her family she turns it into an especially prized version of otlu peyniri, Van's famous sheep's milk cheese (with a little goat milk mixed in) threaded with pickled wild fennel, onions and other leaves and shoots plucked from the foothills that rise behind the milking ground.

    Cheese season lasts about five months, from May through September or October, and after it ends most of the animals are sent to slaughter. I asked one of the women: What do you do in the winter, when the days are short and the animals give little milk?

    "We sleep."

Since 2010 we've driven over 18,000 kilometers across eastern Turkey seeking out recipes, stories and images for a cookbook. Go here to read here about how a 16-year obsession with Turkey, its food and its people led to Istanbul and Beyond, forthcoming in 2016 from Rux Martin Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

India is Snacklandia

Murukku underway in Tamil Nadu

    Some places do snacks really well. Thailand is one, Sumatra another. And then there is India, a country in a Snack Class all its own. In Tamil Nadu we found the snacks so copious, so varied, so readily available that we could have foregone proper meals and subsisted on snacks alone for days.

    For me, food is "snack" if it's portable and can be eaten with one hand. My ideal snack is also liquor friendly; extra points if it's crispy. Unsauced samosa and vadai, bhajii and bonda qualify as snacks. So do lighter bites -- like the myriad wafers, crisps and crunchies made at two old family-owned snacks workshops we visited in Karaikudi, a small town in Chettinad.

At least eight crisp snacks sold from a stall in Tamil Nadu

    "Forty or so years ago every household would have made their own snacks. Nowadays no one has time for that, so we do it for them," said the manager of Soundaram's, our first snack stop. Snacks are ubiquitous in Tamil Nadu life she told us, adding that when she was young her mother always set out one sweet and one savory snack for her to eat when she returned home from school.

    By Sunday mid-morning production was already well underway at the 15 year-old workshop, which is housed in a family home. Snack making happens out back on a large thatch-roofed patio, whilie a small room next to the home's entrance does double duty as storeroom and showroom. When we arrived stacks of plastic-packaged snacks teetered atop folding tables, with more piled knee deep on the floor. While we were there customers streamed into the house and left carrying two, five and even twenty bags of snacks. By the time we departed two hours later the workshop's inventory was nearly depleted.

    The Day of Rest is a big one for snacks.

   

    Before heading out to the workshop we sat down to taste. The photo above shows just some of Soundaram's product, all of which are deep-fried and most of which are made with one or another variety of dal and/or rice flour. Before traveling to Tamil Nadu I was familiar mainly with the spicy deep-fried coils called murukku (named for their shape, for murukku means "twisted" in Tamil), which are sold in Penang's Little India in the days leading up to Deepavali. But I had no idea that the Indian snacks repertoire was so vast.

    Mavurundai (next to the cup of chai) are crumbly Mexican wedding cookie-reminiscent balls of moong dal (yellow mung beans), ghee and sugar, sweet but not saccharine. Kai murukku (moving clockwise from the balls) are pleasantly thick unspiced coils of ground rice mixed with toasted split urad dal (back lentil), while seepu seedai (so named because of their ridges -- seepu means "comb"), are light and crispy with a texture recalling the American corn crisp Bugles.

    Blossom-shaped achu murukku (achu for "sweet") are sugary and a little bit sticky and probably the most substantial snack of the bunch. Manakolam taste toasty and a bit like American-Chinese chop suey noodles. Seed-like seedai are plain and extra crunchy, almost hard, while the beautiful ridged coil called kaara murukku has a wee bite from powdered chilies. My two favorite Tamil Nadu snacks are up top: lovely layered athirasam sweetened with jaggery and scented with cardamom, and super spicy flattened disks called thattai.

    Soundaram's employs about 20 women ranging in age from 16 to their mid-twenties; on any given day half of the staff are out back toasting dal, mixing dough, kneading together palm and cane jaggeries for athirasam, sifting rice flour and deep-frying snacks.

    In one corner thattai, for which moong dal, bengal gram and rice flour are mixed with the pungent spice asafoetida, sea salt and powdered chili, were in process. The dough had been mixed earlier and left to rest briefly. Now two ladies worked together, one rolling walnut-sized pieces of dough into balls while the other pressed them into patties, which she then lightly perforated -- this to prevent the wafers from puffing up when they hit hot oil and to give extra crispiness.

  

    At Meiyammai Ramasamy, our second snack stop, workers fry their snacks the old-fashioned way, on big stone hearths fueled by wood. "We'll miss the flavor if we use gas," Meiyammai's owner told me. (She also added that gas is more expensive than wood.)

    Meiyammai's product line is not as vast as Soundaram's; in the workshop only murukku (opening photo) and athirasam were were in progress. As one woman used oiled fingertips to pat out thin rice flour and jaggery patties another placed a pinch of dough at the base of her hearth -- an offering to the elephant-headed Lord Ganesh. Then she slipped the uncooked athirasam into shimmering oil where they sunk, quickly resurfacd, puffed and browned.

    I couldn't say whether or not the scent of wood smoke had anything to do with it, but I did prefer Meiyammai's athirasam over Soundaram's. Made with less jaggery than usual, it cooks up lighter and highly layered, with an extra flaky surface that almost floats off of the pastry. And there's nothing like eating a kai murukku warm out of the kadai.

    Like the shoppers at Soundaram's we left both workshops laden with bags of athirasam, murukku and thattai. With three more days of road travel ahead there would be plenty of time for snacking in the car.

Soundaram’s Chettinad Sweets and Snacks No. 62, M.G. Road 3^rd Cross, Soodamanipuram, Karaikudi. +90 456 565 0733

Meiyammai Ramasamy, No 3 Narayana Ambalam South Street, Kottaiyur

A Helva to Beat All, in Diyarbakir

    I didn't eat helva until I was in graduate school. Dave and I lived in Boston's south end around the corner from a tiny Lebabanese restaurant, where at the end of every meal (chunks of ice-cold cucumber napped with minty thick yogurt got us through a long hot summer) diners were presented with a thin slice of helva. Its airy-foamy texture and nutty flavor reminded me of the innards of a Butterfinger bar. I liked it, but not enough to pursue helva elsewhere.

    A decade later we were in Istanbul, where helva is everywhere. At first I didn't know what those big bricks and wheels displayed in the windows of sweets shops -- some solid in color, others studded with nuts, still others with swirls of brown or black -- were. This was certainly not the helva I'd seen in boxes on the shelves of Middle Eastern grocery stores. But somehow I figured it out. We entered one of those shops and tasted -- my first experience of helva shaved from a piece that was probably made, at least in part, by hand was a revelation.

    That word, revelation, is probably overused in food writing. But I can't think of a better way to describe how that first bite of "real" helva changed my view of a sweet that lots of folks these days probably take for granted. It wasn't one-note, it wasn't just sugary. It truly tasted like sesame seeds, oily in a good way, sweet yes, but with a good kick of bitterness following up on the sweet. I fell hard, and Dave and I bought a kilo to take back to Shanghai. On the long flight home our helva hunk leaked oil through its wrapper, through its plastic bag and on to my clothes. But we began a nightly ritual of stingily shearing slivers from our helva hunk after dinner. And soon I couldn't have cared less about the demise of my favorite sweater.

  

     Last summer I found my dream helva in a tiny, absolutely unassuming shopfront near the city wall in Diyarbakir's historic center.  Dave and I had passed it by several times, noting the tawny corpulent cakes displayed in its windows. Once again, we were looking at helva without knowing it was helva (but we should have, given the bulging bags of tahini displayed alongside the cakes). Finally curiosity got the best of us. Inside we found a pristine marble counter and Hassan, the third generation of his family to work at the shop, who rattled off the short menu: susamli helva (sesame helva), mayali helva ("yeasted" helva) and mayasiz helva (un-"yeasted" helva).

    We ordered a mixed plate, so to speak, and savored our helva at a table as Hassan filled orders for half a kilo, two kilos, five kilos of helva to go. His family's tahini, with which they make their helva, is made in Sanliurfa from imported sesame seeds

    The mayasiz helva cut like butter and boasted the dense texture of fudge (it's pictured above, with the sesame helva) while the sesame helva, cloaked in a layer of white sesame seeds, was like nougat: chewy and sticky, delicious but difficult to dislodge from my molars. My favorite was the mayali helva -- super light, layered on the tongue, almost effervescent in the way it dissolved on my tongue without so much as a single chew. I could have eaten half a kilo in one sitting (but restrained myself). All three had the most tremendous flavor, bold and round and nutty with a dose of bitterness and a sweetness so subtle that it was the last note my palate registered.

    (By the way, "yeasted" here most likely means that the helva is made with egg whites or maybe Gypsophila, a root that is boiled in water to make a liquid that when beaten resembles egg whites.)

    We returned to this shop -- whose name I've neglected twice now to note -- again this last April. In the interim I'd had the opportunity to taste tahini around the southeast, where tahini is produced and figures in many local dishes. (At least out east, Turkish cuisines are hyper local; you won't find tahini in Black Sea pantries.) None have come close in either texture or flavor to the helva made by Hassan's family.

    Helva -- the Turkish word is derived from the Arabic "halwa" (sweet or dessert) -- assumes many forms in Turkey. There is the nut and sesame-based helva as you commonly find sold at Istanbul sweets shops. There is kagit helvasi (paper helva), layered wafer disks that you might see sold on Istanbul ferries. There is keten helva ("linen helva" -- also known as pismaniye, pesmek, tel helvasi and a number of other terms), a cotton candy-reminscent sweet of flour, butter and sugar that's made in a laborious three-step process (described in detail in Mary Isin's Sherbet and Spice: The Complete Story of Turkish Sweets and Desserts, an indispensible reference for anyone interested in the history of sweets in Turkey). And there are a whole host of homemade helva too, made with flour, starch, semolina or fine bulgur,and butter, cheese and/or milk.

    If you tell a Turkish person that you love helva he or she is likely to respond with "Which helva?" For me there's only one answer: Any helva from Hassan's shop in Diyarbakir.

On the south side of Inonu Caddesi near the SV Business Hotel, a little west of Gazi Caddesi.

Samosa Love in Chennai

     Late last year we spent a whirlwind nine days in Tamil Nadu. I haven't written about it much here ... there were details and photographs to save for a feature story in SBS Feast (it ran in the April issue) and columns about about street coffee, dosa and "risky" eating in Wall Street Journal Asia. Tamil Nadu was one of our most delicious trips of recent years, but it happened not long after we'd returned from Turkey and shortly before Christmas. Discoveries and revelations were lost to the holidays and preparation for travel in early 2014.

    Our journey took us to Chennai, Madurai and Karaikudi. Of course street food was a focus. Ironically one of the most memorable places that we ate at in Chennai wasn't of Chennai at all. Bombay Lassi, opened over 50 years ago by -- no surprise here -- a native of Bombay, came at the end of a long day of eating. Reviewing my notes, I find that we'd started the morning with pickles and sweets at a small shop in Mylapore, and then moved a few doors down for curd vadai (an urad lentil ball soaked in fresh yogurt seasoned with curry leaf and cumin and mustard seeds) and curd rice (steamed rice mixed with yogurt) -- no photos because the proprietor of the mess where we ate would not allow it. Then came coffee and a thali rice meal with 12 components followed by a selection of milk sweets, and then a few hours later MORE sweets at a sweets shop.

    The day was furnace hot; we did little walking. By the time we arrived at Bombay Lassi I was uncomfortable, ready for a liedown. The last thing I wanted to do was eat.

    But, but ..... the place had all the signs of a find. It was well off the main street, several blocks down an alley and then to the left down a narrow lane. Despite this, and the fact that the neighborhood was not densely populated (a large theater occupies the lot facing the shop) and it was at least an hour past work hours the place was hopping, the lane on which the shop sits filled with standing (because there are no seats at Bombay Lassi), happily munching customers.

    Every one of these people would have had to go at least a bit out of his or her way to get to Bombay Lassi. The crowd suggested that the effort was worth it.

     Despite its name Bombay Lassi's biggest seller is samosa (there's lassi too, "savouriest lassi", as the shop's sign says -- and sweets like jalebi, milk halwa, and gulab jamun). These thick-skinned beauties, larger than others we sampled while in India, are made in  a room adjacent to the sales counter and fried by an impressively bearded and bellied man just out front, on the street,

 
from where they're ferried next door to the service counter

where they're smashed, plated on a teak leaves and smeared with mint chutney and tamarind sauce.

    As soon as my companion dug into his somosa I quickly caved and accepted one, then asked for another. Despite their hefty skins the samosa were nearly greaseless, crispy, chewy ... inside I found onion, potato, peas flavored with garam masala, ginger and garlic, the vegetables distinct rather than part of a mush. The samosa's relatively "heavy" filling was lightened by the freshness of the mint chutney and the sweet tanginess of the tamarind sauce.

    Lacking experience eating samosa in, well, Bombay I couldn't say whether or not the smash-before-service technique is common. But it's a brilliant way to release heat while creating cracks and crevices via which the chutney and tamarind sauce can seep into the wrapper and mingle with the filling.

    The proprietor was happy to properly plate a few samosa for a photo,

 
but on my next visit, if there is one (I hope there is one) I'll certainly opt for the teak leaf.

Bombay Lassi, Ellis Road (behind Devi Theater), Chennai.