When Turkey is mentioned undoubtedly the first thing that comes to mind along with its incredible culture, is its delicious and rich cuisine. There is so much to talk about the food culture in Turkey. From delicious Kebabs to the best Döners, from the endless Turkish breakfast tables to everybody’s favorite Turkish Delight. Not to mention, Turkish tea served after every meal and the incredible fortunes told after having a Turkish coffee. Not only is it the flavor of the food, but also, and most importantly, the joy and meaning hidden behind them that makes this culture so cherished.
Overview of Turkish Cuisine
Turkish cuisine can be described as the perfect combo of savory and spicy. Though it is mainly meat-based, mezes (a sort of Turkish tapas) and vegetarian dishes are also a great part of its cuisine. With the countless vegetable dishes, it is definitely heaven for vegetarians as well. Dishes including meat are usually based on lamb and mutton, or beef and chicken. Apart from that, Seafood is also a big part of Turkish cuisine. Incredible fish restaurants can be found all around Turkey, popular with its incredible mezes and Turkish Rakı (a clear brandy made from grapes and raisins). However, being a country with traditions rooted in Islam, don’t expect to find any pork in Turkish cuisine.
If you have any food allergies, read this.
Cooking Methods
The most common preparations are roasting and grilling, which produce the famous Turkish kebaps, including döner kebap; the national dish, and köfte; the workingman's favorite. But there's much more to Turkish cuisine than grilled meat for sure. As my friend Chef Eveline Zoutendijk has said, "It's not a complicated cuisine. It can be labor-intensive, but it produces an amazing variety of colors and bold flavors."
The ingredients must be the best, and carefully chosen. The preparation works to enhance the beauty and excellence of the food more than the reputation of the cook. This is where the Vegetarian dishes stand out. As we all know, it is not always the easiest to make a vegetable-based dish shine out, and turn it into a star dish of the night. Turkish cuisine in this context can be considered one of the best. Every vegetable dish is exceptional, and so flavorful that it could even turn a meat lover into a vegetarian, so confident am I about Turkish cuisine. Roasting, grilling, frying, and smoking… are the main methods used. Turkish cuisine knows very well that exposing vegetables to a little heat is the point where they start to reveal all their flavor, sweetness, and aromas.
Want to know how to cook like Turks, see how things function in the kitchen, and get to know the secret tips? Why not attend a Turkish Cooking class then, and emerge yourself into the world where food meets flavor?
History of Turkish Cuisine
Since ancient times, every nation has had its way of life, and this undoubtedly greatly influenced the formation and shaping of their culture. Since the Turks lived a nomadic life for most of the course of their history, this lifestyle reflected itself in their food culture.
Being nomadic, they didn’t have the opportunity to focus a lot on vegetables and fruits, taking a long time to grow. This is why meat plays a big role in the food history of the Turks. They used any possible part of the animal, which can nowadays clearly be observed in various popular dishes, such as Kokoreç, Kelle Paça, Şırdan, Mumbar, etc.
Later on, they started to incorporate ground vegetables, such as potatoes, turnips, carrots, or spinach, cabbage, etc. vegetables which wouldn’t take a long time to grow. They learned how to harvest rice from the Chinese while they taught them how to cook with oil and fry in return.
Once they started to settle down, as in the Ottoman period, Turkish Cuisine surpassed itself and reached a whole new level. That period is also seen as the brightest in the course of the food history of Turkey. Dried fruits, goat, and sheep, as well as different spice combinations of sweet and sour, spicy and salty, started to gain a lot of importance.
Turkish Cuisine Nowadays
Traditional Turkish Breakfast
Coming to Turkey one of the first must-do things is to have a Traditional Turkish Breakfast. It is like a never-ending table, continuously being updated as you keep eating. You are served with a dozen jams, honey, different cheeses, breads, eggs, charcuteries, along with the indispensable delicious Turkish Tea. This kind of Turkish breakfast is not something to have every day, but it is for sure a nice activity to do with a group of people, turning it into more of a brunch than only breakfast on its own. One of the best and most fun parts of it is when you end the breakfast with a delicious cup of Turkish coffee, usually followed by a coffee fortune telling.
Talking about cheese, Turkish village artisanal cheeses have started to gain popularity with local and visiting gourmets, and are now making their way into shops and onto restaurant menus.
Bread
Bread is a big part of Turkish food culture. Turks eat bread with almost everything. Bread is baked fresh early morning for breakfast and lunch, and late afternoon for dinner. It varies from the common sourdough loaf through whole-wheat loaves to rounds of leavened pide (flat bread) to flaps of paper-thin lavaş (unleavened village bread baked on a griddle). One of the most popular breakfast bread made in Turkey, which can be found at almost every peddler, is Simit. A crunchy, round-shaped bread covered with sesame seeds, has become a breakfast classic of Turkey.
Meat and Vegetables
Meat portions are smaller compared to those in North America (which are unconscionably huge). You can find goat, sheep, veal, and lamb meat, along with chicken, turkey, and fish, except pork which is not consumed in Turkey.
Actually, vegetables predominate in most meals, though many vegetable recipes use small amounts of meat as a flavoring. If you're not strictly vegetarian or vegan, yet you prefer to eat more vegetables than meat, you'll do very well in Turkey. Here are some tips for vegetarians. Turkey is also very popular for its dried legume dishes, such as dried beans, lentils, chickpeas etc. which are also great options for vegetarians.
Among the best and easiest places to sample Turkish food is in a hazır yemek ("ready-food") restaurant.
Street-food and Mezes
Mezes, side dishes, and street foods are a big part of Turkish food culture. When visiting a new country people usually prefer to grab local street food, by which they attain an idea of the food culture, and become part of it. Some of the most popular street foods in Turkey are, Kebap, Döner, Istanbul fish sandwich, Midye (stuffed mussels), gözleme (fresh-baked flatbread folded over savory ingredients—a sort of Turkish crêpe), börek, (pastry filled with cheese and vegetables or meat), Kokoreç (dish made of animal intestines) and Simit (breakfast classic, crunchy sesame bread).
Mezes are a sort of Turkish Tapas. Usually at fish or kebap restaurants, various mezes are served. You can learn so much about the food culture through mezes, that for me it is one of the best ways to experience food in Turkey. Read more about Turkish Mezes.
Beverages and Juices
Turkey is famous for its succulent fruit, and thus for its fruit juices. One of the most famous drinks in Turkey is Ayran. It is a liquid yogurt drink, mixed with spring water, lightly salted, tasting a bit like buttermilk. It is the best combo with Kebap and Döner.
Islam forbids drinking alcohol, but many urban Turks are European in their lifestyle and about 15% of the population enjoy alcoholic beverages with meals: beer, wine, and Turkish rakı (a clear grape brandy flavored with anise and diluted with water) are the favorites, although gin, vodka, whiskey and liqueurs are also served.
Apart from these Turkey is also famous for its fermented juices, such as Şalgam, a red-colored turnip juice, and Boza, an old fermented drink with almost a pudding consistency, made of corn, wheat, and rye flour left in the water to ferment.
And of course, there is everybody's favorite, Turkish tea, the national stimulant, not only at breakfast but also served almost after every meal.
Turkish Coffee
I wanted to make a separate heading for Turkish coffee because that one is much more than just being a regular coffee. It is a culture, something that brings people together, where imagination exceeds itself.
Turkish coffee, is a classic of hospitality. Not being the sort of coffee we are used to, Turkish coffee is coffee with sediment, although the sediment is not supposed to be drunk, some foreigners who do not know this try to finish their cups, and that is when it turns into an unpleasant experience. The residue is used to read fortunes after the coffee is finished. The coffee cup is turned upside down and waited for it to cool. After cooling, the coffee cup is opened, and by improvising from the symbols formed in it, the moment of fortune-telling starts.
Turkish Sweets
Turkish Delights, the world-renowned sweets. Everyone coming to Turkey is crazy about Baklava, (layered syrupy filo pastry dessert) and Lokum (a starchy cube-shaped sweet confection). Apart from these, Turkey has thousands of different desserts. One of them, which I find always interesting, is Tavukgöğsü, which is a pudding made from very thinly shredded chicken breast. You can’t taste the chicken at all, but who doesn’t like a high-protein dessert anyways? Read More about Turkish Desserts.
How is Turkish Cuisine Viewed
Turkish cuisine has been renowned for a long time. In 1854 the Earl of Carlisle (George W F Howard) visited Constantinople (Istanbul) and sampled Turkish food in a simple bazaar cookshop. The understated praise in his travelogue “Diary in Turkish and Greek Waters” (1854) reads, "We...went for our luncheon to a Turkish, not kibaub, but cook-shop, where different ragouts of meat and vegetables are always ready in large pans. I think the nation has a decided turn for cookery."
Originality and creativity, prized among chefs in some other countries, are deemed appropriate in Turkey only after one has mastered the traditional cuisine—and when one has created a traditional masterpiece, there is little need for much in the way of innovation. Innovation cannot substitute for finesse. And this is the key to the incredible Turkish Cuisine.
Afiyet Olsun!
- by Tom Brosnahan, updated by Julide Koca
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