Mardin Hayat Çöreği: How We Bake in Turkey

Living abroad for the past 10 years, I have learned one certain thing: you should never take for granted how people go about routines. Think about street crossing. In Norway any car, however big and cool, will slow down to let you cross the street. In India no car will ever stop to let you cross, but if you find the courage to start crossing and signaling where you are heading, the drivers will take you into account. In Russia a car may run over you crossing the road if the driver is an oligarch. In Turkey you play chicken with an approaching car to see who has more self-confidence - you crossing the road or the car driver running over you. These differences come from the different chips we were born with and the different conditions we grew up in, so don’t assume that you and me bake in the same way.

I am continuing the series on the long-keeping Turkish biscuits with the Mardin gingerbread recipe. Poetically named hayat çöreği (“life biscuit”), they are served for weddings, funerals and other significant events in every family in this South-Eastern province. I am going to use the Mardin gingerbread for a different occasion here: to explain you how we bake in Turkey.

1) Finding a reliable recipe

There is no shortage of recipe sources, to start with: recipe websites, food blogs, cooking books, food TV shows - we have it all in Turkey. But the trouble comes when you are after a reliable recipe. Many Turkish home cooks are experienced enough to do without recipes at all. Instead, they rely on proportions: 1 cup water to 1 cup sugar for the sugar syrup if you are baking a syrupy dessert, 1.5 to 2 cups water to 1 cup rice (depending on the type of rice) if you are making pilaf. And because many home cooks stick to the Turkish classics and a range of the specialties from their home region, they know what they cook like the back of their hands.

Less reliance on the recipe means that many cooks do not treat any recipe literally. It’s more of a guideline, an idea, a reminder rather than a cut-in-stone directive. That’s why I have hard times following recipes in Turkey: quantities are rarely accurate, the amount of seasoning is often skipped, the directions are brief. What’s worse, the recipes are rarely tested. I had a few epic failures when I followed the recipes from the acclaimed Turkish cookbook authors and celebrity chefs.

Hence my new obsession with the Turkish cooking shows (yes, plural like 6 coffee shops in the same street) where the hosts travel throughout the Turkish regions and cook with the locals. The local cooks present a range of foods: I fast-forward every time someone attempts a tart, but I start paying attention and often take notes when the cook in question makes the region-specific dishes. At the cooking shows you can see the bits and pieces that escape from the written recipes (episode notes often state the opposite of what the cook did), see the quantities (the cook says she is putting 2 tbsp, while we see her putting two heavily heaped tablespoons that measure up to 5 tbsp) and the resulting textures.

On one of the shows I came across a recipe of Mardin hayat çöreği: Nazan Hanım, the local cook who demonstrated them, radiated so much confidence that she looked like somebody to learn from. I just wrote about my mother-in-law’s Anamur coregi and was captivated by the similarities and differences between the biscuits from the two neighboring regions on the South and South-East of Turkey. So I set on re-creating those Mardin biscuits at my kitchen.

2) Converting tea glasses into grams and cups

The ingredient list included your regular 1 coffee cup of this, half a water glass of that and full tea glass of this. These measurements might sound definitive for a Turkish cook, but my ever-doubting mind rebels! It does make sense to use the common kitchen items as the handy measurement tools, but these days coffee cups, water glasses and tea glasses come in every size. Take tea glass: i it a small çaycı tea glass that you find in the Istanbul tea houses, sosyete çay bardağı (“high society glass”, or popular Pasabahce’s Ajda) or something in between?

Still, tea glass is more definitive than ölçü referring to a bowl that you use as a proprietary unit of measurement at your own kitchen. When I was helping my mother-in-law, I once misplaced a glass bowl while unloading the washing machine. The bowl was fashioned like an open flower with the sides of the bowl being the petals. I put it in the wooden cupboard where we keep whimsical and rarely used bowls, plates and glasses. To my big astonishment, my mother-in-law expected to see the bowl back on her baking working station, because she used that glass bowl as a measurement tool!

So you have to assume something, and I settle on one of the three tea glass types I have in my cupboard. I get armed with all sorts of Turkish measuring units, cups and scales and start making assumptions, doing conversions and taking notes. I convert coffee cups into grams and then into cups and spoons for those who does not use scales. Phew! At last, I can start baking.

3) Adding as much flour as it takes

Not really, because I need to figure out one final bit: the amount of flour. Turkish home bakers often suggest you use ‘as much flour as it takes’. The golden standard of the dough here in Turkey is the feel of touching your earlobe. Wow, baking is not just automatically measuring your ingredients and combining, as the recipe describes! Instead, you must turn on all your senses to do the right thing and to make sure your dough feels like an earlobe. Sometimes a recipe say “softer that the regular dough” or “harder than the regular dough” meaning that we all know how the regular dough should be.

The more I bake the more confident I get to work with soft and very hydrated dough; I am careful not to add too much flour, unless specified. For me there are two criteria that help you determine whether your dough is ready: 1) the dough should stop sticking to your hands, and 2) you must be able to scrape down the sides of the bowl clean with the resulting dough, a trick I’ve learned from my mother-in-law. If the both criteria hold - you get a soft.. well, earlobe-soft dough.

Probably, earlobes also differ a lot: the dough of the Mardin hayat çöreği was suggested as soft, while you could see that it took an effort to mix and shape it on the show. I end up pouring more and more flour to my dough to get to that consistency.

4) Baking until “it blushes like a pomegranate”

While most recipes include baking temperatures, only a few specify the baking times. How do you know the pastry is cooked? “Blushes like a pomegranate” is a handy metaphor used by the Turkish home cooks to describe a well-baked biscuit or cake. Here I don’t blame them. First, Turks are very young bakers unless we talk about the professionals and grandmas who baked in the outdoor wood-fired ovens. A lot of baking used to be done at the communal ovens manned by the professional bakers who would make sure that anything you entrust them bakes or cooks to perfection.

Second, it is still not so common to find a built-in oven at many Turkish kitchens, especially outside of Istanbul. Some houses might be relying on soba, a wonderful multifunctional device that serves as a heater, a stove top and a tiny oven too. Another alternative to a proper oven is a round table-top creature that holds a tray or two of balkava and börek, two essentials traditionally baked at home. Cakes and all that buzz came later.

After two years of our relationships with my built-in oven by a respectable Turkish brand I still have not fully grasped it. When I eventually popped a thermometer in, I understood why anything takes longer in this oven than it should: my oven was no calibrated! When you set it to 180C, the temperature reaches only 170C. It also dramatically drops after you put a tray of goodies to bake (God forbid, it’s a chilled puff pastry). In other words - unreliable. So if I assume that other home bakers are struggling with the same, why to give a baking time? Just let you biscuits blush like a pomegranate!

Baking Mardin hayat çöreği was easy: Nazab Hanım mentioned it should bake for 15 minutes, cool down and then continue baking until it’s done. Bake it for 15-20 min longer, and you have the biscuit with a soft center; 25-30 min in the oven produce a nice rusk.

5) Making sense

After baking and testing the outcome some may feel accomplished, and as for me .. I am still in doubts. Because here comes the final and the hardest challenge of all: how to classify this particular pastry in the terms that make sense to a Western baker? Take the Mardin hayat çöreği in question. Çöreik is neither a cookie nor a bread, even though in some of its forms it may look like either. It could be a scone, but then it would make sense only to the American-based readers: I might even lose some British followers outraged by my ignorance, and everyone else will give me a virtual, but very real blank look. I might call it a rusk, or even a biscotti since it is a double-baked affair (see how careful I am to call it “affair”?!). How to explain a double-baked cookie-shaped spice-loaded brioche dough that tastes like gingerbread minus the ginger?

I might have been bolder and just call it as çörek encouraging you to enrich your Turkish vocabulary with one more useful word. But Turkish phonetics does not help either: from my experience unless you come from the Northern Europe you can hardly manage the “o” with the two dots above. And then there are grammatical complications if you are using the whole phrase Mardin hayat çöreği (a compound noun, by the way): “k” in “çörek” becomes “ği”, where ğ is a deaf consonant you are meant to skip. Are you still with me? Thank you! Shall we proceed to the recipe?

Mardin Hayat Çöreği (Turkish South-Eastern Gingerbread Biscuits)

These rather sensational biscuits come from the Turkish South-East, more know for their kebabs and balkavas. I practically did not alter the original recipe by the Mardin cook in the show, just converted it in the metric units and cups (with some assumptions, of course). Also, I used fresh yeast and whole (versus ground) fennel seeds because this is what I had at hand.

Source: Mardin Episode of TV Show Soframiz

Prep time: 15 min
Cook time: 15 min + 25 min
Total time: 55 min

Ingredients

80 gram (1/3 cup plus 1/2 tsp) unsalted butter, softened
35 gram (2.5 tbsp) sunflower oil
70 gram (1/4 cup plus 2 tsp) plain yogurt
1 medium egg
1.8 gram (1/2 tsp) ground cinnamon
0.8 gram (1/4 tsp) ground mahlep
0.4 gram (1/8 tsp) ground clove
0.4 gram / 1/8 tsp ground allspice
1 gram (1/3 tsp) dry yeast, or 3 gram fresh yeast
90 gram (1/2 cup minus 2 tsp) granulated sugar
0.8 gram (1/2 tsp) whole fennel seeds
3 gram (1 tsp) sesame seeds
0.5 gram (pinch) fine sea salt
350 gram (2 1/2 cups) all-purpose flour, sieved
1 egg yolk, for brushing

Directions

In a large mixing bowl combine soft butter, sunflower oil, yogurt and egg until smooth. Then mix in the ground cinnamon, mahlep, clove, allspice and dry yeast (if using). As a next step stir in the sugar, sesame seeds, fennel seeds, a pinch of salt and finely crumbled fresh yeast (if using). Finally, start gradually adding flour to mix with the rest of the ingredients and form a rather stiff dough. Let it rest covered for about 30 min.

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F. Divide the ball of dough into two and shape each part into a neat ball. Roll one ball into a 23 cm / 9 inch wide round (about 0.5 cm / 0.2 inch thick) and cut into shapes using your favorite cookie cutter, a glass or a simply a knife (mine were about 3×3 cm, 1.2×1.2 inch). Transfer the biscuits on a baking tray lined with the parchment paper. Continue with the remaining ball. Stamp the biscuits with a tip of knife / fork to decorate their tops with geometrical patterns. Brush with the egg yolk. Bake for 15 min, then take the tray out for 15-20 minutes to let the biscuits cool down completely (I put them on the tile flour of my kitchen, for the quickest cooling). Then place in the oven - still at 180C/350F - to bake for 25 minutes more, until the tops are red-brown. Cool down completely. Store in a tightly closed container: the biscuits keep well for at least 3 weeks.