Let’s Talk Turkish Cuisine

While I’ve been learning a lot about the Turkish language, culture and [ancient] history (a refresh of everything I forgot from high school world history) from our tour guide, it’s when he starts talking about Turkish cuisine when I’m suddenly alert and give him my undivided attention.

Metin gladly posed for this photo…

From what I’ve learned and observed myself, Turkish cuisine is very meat heavy. You can find a great deal of vegetables, beans, yogurt, olives and fruit, but they’re mostly supplemental to meat-based entrees. According to our guide, up until about 10 years ago, vegetarian dishes were very difficult to come by in Turkey.

Ironically, the veggies here are insanely delicious—so sweet and flavorful. The tomatoes and cucumbers especially.

Turkish people love to eat. There’s no such thing as being “fat.” Men are proud of their big bellies and refer to them as “Turkish muscles” .

They love yogurt (for savory dishes, not so much for dessert), cheese, and of course, olives. Olives are everywhere. We’ve driven past thousands and thousands of olive trees already.

We change hotels every 1-2 nights because we are hopping from city to city. Thus, every day has been a little bit different food wise (and getting progressively better!).

This was the buffet at our hotel in Istanbul.

Breakfasts have been fairly consistent across all hotels. I’ve been eating salads for breakfast (weird, I know) with hard boiled eggs. I also have yogurt and fruit (plums, grapefruit, grapes and clementines).

The buffets usually have various rolls, bread and stuffed puff pastries. Overall, the bread is just alright. Nothing to write home blog about.

Eggs, hot dogs, soup and french fries. Every hotel has served french fries for breakfast!

Oh and the coffee is unbelievably good here. That is, when it’s not instant.

Up until last night, I must say I wasn’t too impressed with the Turkish food I had tried. It was alright, but nothing really made me go Mmmm.

A lot of the dishes are served cold or lukewarm, even cooked food. Cooked vegetables are cooked until soft/soggy. It certainly doesn’t help that I’m allergic to random nuts and nothing is ever labeled.

But it all changed when we ate at the hotel dinner buffet in Canakkale.

As you can easily see, the salad bar was out of control!

I loaded up!

Can we take a second to talk about this eggplant? It was life changing!

This eggplant was hands down the most amazing eggplant I have ever tasted in my life. Seeing as how eggplant is my absolute favorite vegetable, this is huge.

I mean, HUGE.

If I had to guess, I would say the eggplant was soaked in olive oil and then pan fried until juuuuust barely crispy. Not crispy enough to notice a crisp, but enough to give it some texture. Does that make sense?

I also filled up my plate with a bean dip, yogurt (to go with the eggplant), salmon, mushrooms and dried apricots.

Creamy tomato soup on the side.

I thought I wasn’t hungry and then I cleaned my plate.

I ate some mediocre pudding and honey dew for dessert. I desperately wanted to try the baklava, but unfortunately, I’m allergic. The one and only time I ate baklava, it came right back up. I learned my lesson.

We ate another great meal for lunch today. I’ll have to tell you about it later though, because it’s time for dinner!

Tell me…your favorite cuisine!