EatingAsia

Catching Up: Turkey Food/Photography Workshop Round-Up, an Istanbul Dining Guide, Asian Street Food, Taipei and More

A memorable breakfast on the Black Sea

    A little over a week ago we returned home to Penang after 7 weeks in Turkey -- our fourth trip there this year, and our longest stay to date since we started traveling to Turkey in 1998. We're not tired of that country yet, nor of road tripping there.

    Almost 4 weeks we spent on the road this time, starting in Ankara where we picked up our car and moving on to Corum, Zile, Turhal, Sivas, Tokat, Kahramanmaras, Antakya, Malatya, Kemaliye, back to Sivas and Tokat again, then Kastamonu, and up to our beloved Sinop on the Black Sea (where we ate the  fish stew pictured above), and then finally back to Ankara, where dropped off our car -- odometer reading some 3,000+ kilometers more than when we picked it up -- and caught a flight back to Istanbul.

    It was one amazing trip. We revisited favorite places (Corum and Tokat and Sinop and Kastamonu, especially), and met up with old friends, and ate favorite dishes. In Antakya, we worked, spending a couple days in a village learning about pomegranate molasses. We watched the pomegranates go from tree to bottle -- an incredibly laborious, time-consuming process that caused me to shake my head in disbelief when our host said that many Turks balk at spending 20 lira for a 1-liter bottle of the stuff. I spent alot of one of those days helping the village ladies seed the pomegranates by hand; by the time we returned to our room that evening my back was aching and my hands were black from holding the halved fruit in one palm as I used a rod to tap out its seeds. Most of the women I worked with spend days, weeks even, a year doing the same thing. They should be charging $50, not $10, per liter.

    Before we hit the road we spent a week in Sapanca, a town about 2 hours by car from Istanbul, where Dave co-taught a photography and cooking workshop with Olga Irez, who writes the Delicious Istanbul food blog. We -- Dave, Olga, Olga's husband Ozgur and I -- had been planning for the workshop since January, and we all had a bit of stage fright right up until the workshop's 8 participants and 3 non-participating partners arrived on a Monday evening. In the end, the week was more wonderful than I think any of us could have hoped for.

    We were a diverse group -- a Canadian travel blogger, a Croatian living and working in Oxford, England, a Russian-Canadian Bangkokian, two Indian Singaporeans, a South African food and travel writer and her Dutch husband, an Australian travel blogger and her husband, and two Americans. Ages ranged from (I'm guessing) late 20s to late 60s. Some new to Turkey, some not. Somehow, we all clicked.

A fishmonger wetting down his product at one of the markets we visited during the workshop

    Over 4.5 days we visited a couple of markets, spent a morning on a small farm watching cheese be made and baking bread in a wood oven, wandered a lovely old Black Sea town, rode 4-wheel drives to a high plateau where a hermit and his wife entertained us with music and then to the top of a mountain where a shepherd tended sheep to the backdrop of golden late afternoon light illuminating a sweeping view of hills and sea. Many photographs were taken. Much delicious food was cooked and eaten. (And yes, some beer and raki and wine was drunk too.) We laughed A LOT.

    At the end of the week, after our last dinner together, we watched a slideshow, 10 images selected by each participant. Given the quality of the work put forward by these folks, most of whom would probably call themselves amateurs, Dave felt a bit like a proud father. The next day we all parted as friends. All in all, a pretty wonderful experience.

    We're planning a repeat workshop, maybe two, for Spring 2014 -- which we'll announce within the next couple of weeks here, on Dave's photo blog and on his photography Facebook page, on Twitter and on EatingAsia's Facebook page. In the meantime, Dave has written about and shared some photographs of the workshop -- have a look at the shortened slideshow of participants' work, at the bottom of the post, and see if you don't agree with my kudos. Olga has thrown up a few workshop posts (with a recipe or two) on her own blog. A few participants have shared impressions of the week on their own blogs: here, here, here and here. You can see more work by participants on their Flickr streams, here, here and here.

Whew! That's a lot of linking. A few more:

Meringue made with mastic, topped with ice cream, at Istanbul's Gram cafe

    Last spring, while Dave and I were on a dream assignment on the Turkish Aegean, I got a call from an editor at Wall Street Journal Asia, asking if we'd be interested in another dream assignment: eating and photographing in Istanbul. (This sort of thing happens, like, never, by the way.) At any rate, the resulting piece, on eating "beyond the kebab" in Istanbul, was a great opportunity to promote cooks and restaurants who who serve up regional and seasonal fare. Read the article here. Do not view Dave's accompanying slideshow on an empty stomach. Share with anyone you know who's heading to Turkey's most touristed city. Kebabs are great but really -- there is so much more to Turkish food.

    The week before this article came out WSJ published another, on the Istanbul chefs behind what's been called "New Turkish" or "New Anatolian" cuisine. We ate at one of the more popular restaurants mentioned in the article and left disappointed (and with the taste of old oil -- from a deep-fried dessert -- in our mouths). It may have been an off night, and it was our first and only experience there, so I won't say which one.

    But Dave's workshop partner Olga who's been eating in Istanbul for a few years now and has become a formidable cook of Turkish food herself, has an interesting take on all the hubbub over Istanbul's recent culinary revival. You can read it here. I can't agree more with this sentiment:

Every time I travel in Turkey I am astounded by the wisdoms accumulated in the foods and preparations you can find even in the smallest towns and villages. How little is done to preserve and reproduce these important culinary traditions! How little people know about those foods and even less interest they have in learning about them! - See more at: http://www.deliciousistanbul.com/blog/2013/10/24/istanbul-culinary-revival/#sthash.Yg4J7Lh2.dpuf

    We are still publishing EatingTurkey, a tumblr with short, 1 or 2-photo food posts from our road trips (and a bit of Istanbul). It's off and on, more on when we're there than when we're here in Penang ... but we've got a bit of material up from these recent 7 weeks. View it here.

    And Dave's thrown up a first bunch of photos from our 4-week road trip, some food and some not but all pretty great (yeah, I'm biased), on his blog SkyBlueSky, here.

Every time I travel in Turkey I am astounded by the wisdoms accumulated in the foods and preparations you can find even in the smallest towns and villages. How little is done to preserve and reproduce these important culinary traditions! How little people know about those foods and even less interest they have in learning about them! - See more at: http://www.deliciousistanbul.com/blog/2013/10/24/istanbul-culinary-revival/#sthash.Yg4J7Lh2.dpuf

    In August a Portland, Oregon radio station aired an interview with me about road tripping and eating regionally in Turkey. The interview is about 3 minutes long, and you can listen via the MP3 below.

PortlandTravel.Robyn.2

    In July we spent a very short 6 days in Taipei, a city that too few foodies appreciate. When we returned to Penang I penned -- in 3 days, record time for me -- a feature story for the September issue of Travel+Leisure Southeast Asia. It's accompanied by Dave's mouthwatering photographs, and you can read it here.

    I penned an ode to George Town for the August issue of Malaysia Airlines' Going Places magazine. Here's a pdf of the piece, accompanied by Dave's photographs (which are, unfortunately, miscaptioned. These things happen.)

     I'm still writing a regular column on street food in Asia for Wall Street Journal Asia. I don't usually announce it here on EatingAsia when a column goes up, but all to date can be viewed here. Recently I've written on som tam as a technique and flavor profile, not a dish, and the joy of tofu, in all its various street food incarnations around southeast Asia. Anything you'd be interested in seeing me cover in the column? Leave a comment below.

    Finally -- and congratulations if you've made it this far -- Dave and I are pondering the possibility of staging a worshop, for a maximum of 4 to 6 participants and with a bit more emphasis on photography than the workshops in Sapanca (but with plenty of delicious food) in Turkey next autumn away from Istanbul, in an photogenic region that we have come to adore. No details on that yet, but if it sounds like something you might be interested in knowing about please drop me ([email protected]) or Dave ([email protected]) an email. As with the Sapanca workshop -- all photographers welcome, amateur to professional.

    That should do it for now. It's good to be home. Now to get back to regular posting.....

Nyonya Fireworks

    Nyonya dishes are labor intensive and time consuming. It's said that the best are served in private homes. I believe that, because in Penang nothing I've eaten in any traditional Nyonya restaurant compares to the food I've eaten at Madame Khaw's cart.

    I last wrote about Madame Khaw almost 6 years ago. Every morning she rises early, prepares a mess of Nyonya curries, stews, vegetables and relishes, and wheels it all over to Pulau Tikus market, where she sells from her cart from 6 or 7am till noon. Madame Khaw is a Penang-born Nyonya (Nyonya are the female descendents of long-ago marriages between Hokkien traders and Malay women; the male descendents are called "Baba") who learned to cook, she tells me, from her Hokkien father. (Her brother mans a cart selling homemade Nyonya kuih, or sweets, which he sets up next to her stall in Pulau Tikus on Saturdays.)

    Madame Khaw's Nyonya delights are transcendent. She cooks with an assured hand, often pushing  the edge of the envelope by upping the quantities of strong-flavored ingredients in an already strong-flavored dish. This is how I cook too, like an addict feeding an addiction: just a few more chilies, another teaspoon of each dried spice, fresh herbs by the handful instead of the quarter cupful and 5 different types of fresh herb when a recipe calls for 2 or 3. I love strong, really strong flavors, and foods that leave me searching for descriptives. After a meal at Madame Khaw's stall the best I can come up with is "fireworks". That's a compliment.

    This morning was no different. Two friends in town, our last breakfast together after almost 48 hours of bordering-on-pathological indulgence. Dave and I love all of Madame Khaw's dishes. But our bellies had been stretched, and our taste buds bordered on fatigued. So we opted for three favorites, all punchy enough to revive faltering appetites.

    First, Madame Khaw's stellar asam fish, a deep-fried whole specimen or steak marinated in turmeric-infused oil and vinegar. Many recipes for this dish call for a few whole chilies. Madame Khaw's version is approximately one third to one half chilies in volume. There's plenty of turmeric in there -- the oil is good and orange -- and finely shredded ginger and sliced garlic and sesame seeds too. It's tart (asam is the Malay/Indonesian word for "sour") with a wonderful hit of astringency. Should you choose to eat one of those chilies (I always do) the jolt of heat will cut right through the vinegar and then quickly subside. It's a powerfully addictive dish, one I'm sure that I could eat every day.

    An appropriately gutsy accompaniment is Madame Khaw's nasi ulam, a cool dish of rice mixed with (she says) twenty or so rhizomes (turmeric, ginger, Chinese keys) and fresh herbs -- including wild lime, turmeric and wild pepper leaves (the latter of which is often mistakenly called "betel leaf") and Vietnamese mint -- as well as sliced shallot. Madame Khaw does not own a food processor, preferring to chop, to the minutest dice, all of her rhizomes by hand. The leaves she rolls and slices into the wispiest of chiffonades. Tossed with the vegetables, the rice remains fluffy, each grain distinct. There is so much going on in this dish in terms of flavor and texture that you have to pause after each mouthful to take it all in. It tastes healthy in a way that no other rice dish I know does and, like the asam fish, is thoroughly addictive. It's also usually the first dish on Madame Khaw's cart to sell out.  

    We rounded out our plate with Penang-style acar, a fantastic relish of fresh pineapple, carrot, long beans and cucumber tossed with a dressing heavy on vinegar and crushed peanuts. Usually eaten as a side dish, acar is one I'd be happy to give star billing to. (I also envision its freshness enlivening slices of roast pork in a Penang Nyonya-style banh mi.)

    Penang's Nyonya food is generally more sour, less coconut milky, fresher (incorporating more fresh herbs as opposed to dry spices) and spicier than the Malacca's -- a result, presumably, of Penang's proximity to Thailand. Madame Khaw's food, and these three dishes especially, embody everything I love about it.

    I understand the occasional desire for a restaurant meal now and again, as opposed to one eaten standing around a cart outside a wet market. Believe me, I do. But if you have time for one Nyonya meal on Penang, make it at Madame Khaw's elbow. (She also sells everything for takeaway, and offers plastic spoons.)

Photography Expedition in Gorgeous NE Turkey (and a Feature in Feast Magazine)

The April issue of Australia's SBS Feast magazine includes our feature story on the cow-centric cuisine of Ardahan and Kars provinces, in northeastern Turkey. Included are 6 recipes, for a lentil-tomato soup with handmade noodles and croutons fashioned from the noodle dough; scone-biscuits made from ground dried corn; cherry tomato preserves; fresh pasta handkerchiefs with blue cheese; silky roasted eggplants stuffed with chopped beef; and rustic apple bars.

Doesn't sound much like the usual Turkish fare, does it? As our travels over the last few years have shown us, so much of what many think of as "Turkish food" is really only the tippy-top of the iceberg. Our Feast article is just a taste of what we've found out there, beyond Istanbul, on our road trips. We'll be sharing more in the coming months. 

***

We did part of the research and photography for our Feast article while on a "crash test" trek with Balyolu, an American-founded, northeastern Turkey-based social enterprise headquartered in Kars city. We found out about Balyolu a year ago, via Kickstarter.

We shun tours. But though we certainly do get out there on our own when we travel, we're not equipped to nor, I think, capable of navigating our way across kilometers of open country. We were intrigued by what Balyolu was offering: a very casual, low-key trek village-to-village. Sleeping in homes and eating (and cooking) with villagers. And so we gave ourselves a late 25th anniversary present by contributing to Balyolu's Kickstarter campaign at the maximum level. In June we set off for our second-ever tour. (The first was in Bhutan in 1998). 

That week was amazing. Northeastern Turkey is without a doubt the country's most beautiful region. It's just breathtaking. Wide open spaces. Craggy mountains, high plateaus, rushing rivers, placid lakes, Big Sky. In early June, when we were there, the region's lush greenness was complemented by sprays of yellow, white and purple wildflowers and random patches of unmelted snow. Herds of cows, shephards, cowboys. Oh, the sunsets, and the sunrises. (And then there was the food, the most wonderful cooking from village kitchens.)

A photographer's dream, as you might imagine. Dave was out the door most mornings by 5am (so much for a second honeymoon) and usually had to be dragged inside for dinners that started before nightfall.

We're heading back to Kars this June and we'd love for you to come along, as a participant in fantastic photography expedition that Dave is leading with Balyolu founder and National Geographic Explorer Catherine de Medici Jaffee.

Unlike the cooking / photography workshop near Istanbul that Dave is co-running in September, this week will be all about photography. Oh sure, cooking will be happening in villages, and you'll be able to join in if you'd like. And there will be photography of culinary subjects (bee keeping, cheese making, bread baking in a traditional tandoor). We don't compromise on meals, so that the food will be fabulous should go without saying. But the focus for the week will be on pumping up your photography, and on taking a big pictorial bite out of the region's landscapes, ruins, nature and daily life.

What's different about this expedition? One word: access. You'll overnight in villages (with a few nights in a boutique hotel in Kars), gain entre to artisan workshops, be led to secret ruins. You'll work on portraiture with individuals. You and your camera will go where you'd never go on your own -- and for that matter, where few if any other photographers have gone before. There will be a couple workshops, and lots of one-on-one coaching time with Dave. You'll leave with drop-dead images to add to your collection or portfolio, not to mention lots of good memories of a wonderful week with great folks in a beautiful setting.

(If you're anything like us you'll also leave with an extra pound/kilo or two.)

Best of all? A portion of the profits from the expedition will go to fund Balyolu's work in local villages; the organization offers entrepreneurial aid to rural women and sends village girls to school. (Read more about Balyolu and its activities on the website, here.)

We cannot wait to get back to northeastern Turkey. This 8-night/7-day expedition happens the first week of June. It's limited to six participants. You should be fit enough to get yourself and your camera equipment out to the field, but don't worry, there will be no all-day village-to-village hikes on this trip!

Have a look at the detailed itinerary below, then click here for the full brochure. To view some of Dave's images from our Balyolu experience last year go here and here.

Any questions? Shoot Dave an email: drhagerman [at] gmail [dot] com.

We would love to see you in Kars!