Türkiye

Menu: Sogan dolma, lavash, & salep | Recipe Source: hildaskitchenblog.com & vidarbergum.com

Note: There’s nothing better than tackling a country for this project in the company of a friend. Biggest thank you to Gamze for her help and her enthusiasm!

Sifting through Turkish recipe options became overwhelming super fast because I have such a soft spot for Middle Eastern food and flavors. That said, the second I stumbled across sogan dolma, the decision essentially made itself. There’s nothing I love more in this world than onions*, butit never occurred to me that you could stuff them with other things that you love (in this case, lamb, rice, parsley, mint, and tomato paste). With the exception of using onions instead of cabbage leaves, sogan dolma was delightfully similar to the sarmale I made for Moldova two years ago. The browned meat, spices, and rice were rolled up in a delicate wrapper of boiled onion, packed closely together in a Dutch oven, and then simmered in a tomato-citrus bath for an hour and a half. Gamze recommended that I serve them with garlic yogurt, and unsurprisingly, that turned out to be an absolutely amazing suggestion**.

Lavash, lavash, lavash. I’ve yet to meet a homemade bread I didn’t like, but this one was an outlier amongst the glorious pack***. The recipe I followed yielded four separate flatbreads, and I seasoned one with sesame, one with chives, one with chicken kebab seasoning, and one with garlic salt. It was an extremely well-behaved dough and to make things even better, each flatbread only needed six minutes in the oven- a literal gift from the cooking gods.

The salep was earthy, nutty, and soul-warming. The taste and texture were vaguely reminiscent of tapioca pudding minus the pearls, but there was something incredibly unique about it, too. It had a really gentle smell (virtually none at all, actually) but an impressive depth of flavor, and the fact that the powder comes from crushed wild orchid roots delighted me to no end.

*Anthony probably beats onions, but only by a hair.

**Instead of making my own yogurt sauce, I just grabbed a container of mast-o-moosir (shallot and yogurt dip) from my local Persian grocery story while I was buying the pomegranate molasses and za’atar.

***My current top three ranking for international breads is (in no particular order) Guyanese plait bread, Pakistani na’an, and now lavash).

Ready to cook?

Sogan dolma (link): Minimal changes to this one! I added two bay leaves during the onion boil and added another 3 prior to pouring the tomato sauce over the rolled dolma.

Lavash (link): At the bottom of the recipe, the author included optional instructions for adding sugar and yeast. I always have both of those things on hand, so I decided to give it a whirl! Otherwise, I followed this recipe exactly (aside from going a little rogue with the seasonings).

Salep (link): Aside from swapping whole milk for oat, I followed this recipe exactly!