How do you feel about peeking at other people’s kitchen pantries? This is the first thing I do when allowed to somebody’s kitchen! What can be more fascinating than looking at your friend’s curated collection of jars, boxes, bags of the cooking condiments you also use, you know but have never ventured to cook with or you never knew existed? I love asking questions and hearing stories about how people source their ingredients and what they cook with them. A week ago Alex, my friend from San Francisco living in Istanbul, invited me over to have a look at her pantry.
Our friendship with Alex started with back-and-forths, and it has continued so. You know, when everything you say or do resonates with another person and comes back to you as the unlimited good energy? We met after I wrote about Açık Mutfak, my favorite place to eat home-style food in Istanbul. Alex worked there at the time and emailed me to thank for sending people over. She came for the first meeting of my breakfast club, and that’s how our culinary-driven friendship started.
Alex is a Californian with Italian and Greek family roots and has been living in Istanbul for 3 years. She worked as a landscape designer and a certified permaculture instructor. For a few years, she traveled throughout Europe to learn about the traditional agriculture practices at the small farms. Before that she baked at the renown Tartine Bakery. I am sad she is leaving Istanbul, but I am excited for her to go back home and open a breakfast place in San Francisco with her Turkish fiancé.
As she is leaving Istanbul (and she knows that I am fascinated by the other people’s pantries) she invited me over to go through hers. This is how, once again courtesy of a friend, I became an owner of a few exotic ingredients and well-sourced Turkish staples. I want to share the joy with you.
Being a Californian, Alex has got a small Asian cooking survival kit: soba noodles, seaweed, generous no-label container of miso paste and such. She smuggles those from her abroad travels because it is next to impossible to find high quality Asian cooking ingredients in Istanbul: here we can’t often tell Chinese from Japanese food. As Alex explains these ingredients to me, I recall the signature bowls from 101Cookbooks that eventually start making sense to me. “When everything here becomes too much I just dissolve the miso paste in hot water and drink it as broth,”Alex confesses, and I am thinking how all of us, transplants, must have such culinary anchors that help get through the complexities of living abroad.
Exotic to me ingredients keep coming. Brown cane sugar so dark and moist with molasses that I have not seen before. Mace, blades of the nutmeg peel, used to scent anything baked with the delicate aroma similar to that of nutmeg. “I bought it for the Scottish cookies I was meant to bake - was so hard to find, but I never got the recipe from that woman.” Flaxseed Alex strategically purchased after she found it was a bargain in comparison with the price back home. “What do you do with the flaxseed?’ I ask. “Flaxseed lowers cholesterol. I eat it as is, a spoon or so. Raw stuff, you know? So good for you!” And it occurs to me that if I want to eat things that I good for me, I don’t need to exhaust my brain thinking how I will cook them and whether they will combine with this or that. Just take a spoon, add to your meal or even better - eat raw!
Then come the ingredients that Alex picked during her travels to the countries neighboring Turkey: they speak familiarity and foreignness at the same time. Candied orange peels made by the mother of her Greek friend, diligently rolled, dried, boiled and then stewed in the sugar syrup, not unlike we preserve them in Turkey. Walnut liquor Alex bought from a woman at her roadside stand during a road trip in Macedonia. Alex takes two smallest cups from her deserted cupboard and pours some. “That woman was also selling rakı and hers was a .. fire!” The walnut liqueur also proves to be a real deal. Not much of an alcohol drinker I am picturing how I can use this liquor in baking.
Meanwhile Alex pours a bit of Greek mastic liquor to sample. “Do you know the going price for mastic?” I ask her. “It’s 700 TL a kilo, so this liquor is gold!” We start brainstorming. I am telling her how mastic would work with revani. She tells me that she thinks of sweet mint along with mastic and then recalls the best revani she has ever eaten: it was at Ficcin in Beyoğlu, rich with poppy seeds and glazed. “Yes,” she confirms, “that mint and mastic combination can work well in revani”.
Eventually, Alex takes out a large box of treats she has brought from her trips to the Turkish South-East where her fiance’s family lives. There are sun-dried tomatoes, sweet as a dessert and flavorful as only home-grown tomatoes can be.”Yiğit’s old teacher who grew and dried those himself gave them to us. Down South they make a lovely meze with it: chopped rehydrated tomatoes, black pepper, cumin and olive oil. Delicious!” Alex explains. She hugs and kisses the bag of the sun-dried tomatoes before she hands it over to me. I already know this will be the first thing from Alex’s pantry I will put in a good use.
Then Alex shows me thick hot red pepper paste of deep vinous color from Urfa, or biber reçeli (pepper jam) as Alex was told by the paste’s maker: the fiery paste includes flakes of pepper peel shining like crystals. A Turkish teaspoon of this condiment would be enough to brighten up a large pot of a stew or soup. Then appears Urfa pepper dried and fermented in sacks and dry wild mint so fragrant and intense that the regular mint I dry never turns into.
Alex also gives me a bag of menengiç, deep emerald peppercorn-like berry of a wild pistachio tree and native to the Turkish Mediterranean where these terebinth berries are dried, roasted, ground and turned into a beverage that reminds coffee. “To make çerez,“she says, which sounds exactly like a note to myself I made a year ago but have never got down to its execution.
Finally, Alex hands me over pomegranate molasses from Adana, the stuff that comes in a no-label plastic bottle, usually prepared by a somebody’s neighbor. Just as we experienced in Antakya known for their pomegranate molasses when we asked where to buy the real deal and Özgür friend’s father brought us a plastic bottle filled from a large canister they purchase every year from an acquaintance making it.
Receiving all the delicious gift from Alex made me feel grateful for living in the country where many people are less keen on the mass-produced goods sold at the supermarkets, where sourcing an essential cooking condiment sometimes is as difficult as going to your neighbor and where people happily share what they know and what they have.
ooh what a little treasure-trove! And thank you for the interesting peak!
The sundried tomatoes (and the mezze recipe) and the pomegranate molasses are particularly exciting to me!
My pantry…. well, it’s extensive. I marvel at how it all fits into my kitchen…. I cook a lot of Indian food, so have lots of Indian spices (2 dabbas + multiple jars) and lentils (mung, masoor, toor, channa, whole urid dhal, possibly more). In the fridge, I usually have ginger, curry leaves, coriander and chillies (red + green). I currently have 2 types of Indian rice, basmati and rose matta, plus Jasmine and Arborio. Not to mention nuts, other grains, Chinese ingredients (I cook a lot of Sichuanese), Turkish, etc. etc. etc. It’s just about manageable at the moment. There is some waste, but very little, and mainly due to the fact that some things come in bags that are way too big for the amount we need to use. I do think twice before introducing another ingredient into my pantry, because of all this.