I met Ulli through my Istanbul Breakfast Club and was soon introduced to her own cooking: her meals always strike me as utterly delicious, nourishing and making you feel content and yet light while her baked goods are the most delicious guilt-free treats I have tried in Istanbul. She’s such a fascinating woman that I wanted you to meet her in my Istanbul Pantries Series: I chatted with Ulli about her cooking style, favorite Turkish pantry items and tips for shopping in Istanbul.
Ulli first came to Istanbul in 2002 as a New York-based journalist writing about the art scene in Turkey. From that very visit Ulli has been feeling a strong connection with the city. “Every time my plane is landing in Istanbul, my heart starts beating faster. It never happens to me, say, in Germany where I am from,” she confesses. That possibly explains why after living in the US, Ulli decided to relocate to Istanbul in 2011.
Coincidentally her first visit in Istanbul was among her last journalist assignments as in 2003 she pursued studies of Ayurveda in the US and India, which resulted in the impressive array of credentials: Ulli received a master degree in Ayurvedic Sciences, became a certified Pilates instructor and then AyurYoga teacher, certified Postpartum AyurDoula and got trained in Western Herbalism.
She currently runs her Ayurveda practice in Istanbul and offers consultations, workshops and cooking classes to the locals and foreigners living in the city. Recently Ulli has launched her small-batch gluten-free bakery “Ulli’s Kitchen“.
Ulli says that people often assume that, as an Ayurvedic practitioner, she eats Ayurvedic, meaning Indian food. “It’s not like that at all. If I am to describe the way I eat, it is traditional whole foods”, she clarifies. Ulli uses the Ayurvedic principles according to which food is not viewed in terms of its nutrients, but its energetics. According to those principles, it is important to understand the needs of your body (determined by your dosha and its possible imbalances) and the properties of a particular food (whether it is warming or cooling, light or heavy, dry or oily).
By no means Ulli takes this approach literally. She explains, “I am not sitting with a list of the ingredients that are good for my dosha and thinking what to eat today. If I feel ungrounded I eat more root vegetables; if I feel heavier I eat more leaves or sprouts. On a cold day out if I taught a lot and my Vata is getting high, I will make sure to eat something warm with a bit more oil”.
Ulli is a passionate advocate of whole foods, or “foods as they come from nature,” she explains pointing to their difference from the processed convenience foods. She uses grains and beans in their whole form or freshly ground. Ulli has got a small grain mill (it’s KoMo Classic Grain Mill by Wolfgang Mock aka Fidibus Classic, one of the best things she’s owned as Ulli admits) to grind her grains and beans into a variety of fresh flours for her baking. She makes her own cheese and ghee. She uses vegetables that are whole, not canned or frozen.
Ulli says she likes the idea of the “slow food” because to her food is slow - it takes time to prepare. She admits, however, that she’s got a luxury to spend time on preparing food because of her job. She’s realistic when teaching her cooking classes. “I can’t expect everybody to spend 10 hours making bread as I do”, she says. “So when I teach I create recipes suitable for the city life”.
Ulli is conscious about the quality of her food as she agrees with “you are what you eat” principle. And this is where Ayurveda and Western medicine converge: all of our tissues are built with what we take in, and so food is what eventually becomes our body. Ulli says with confidence, “It is so important that what we take in is of such great quality because only then can we be really healthy”.
That’s why she resorts to the traditional methods of increasing the nutritional value of whole foods. For instance, Ulli sprouts almost everything - all her grains and most of her beans or lentils (remember the sprouted mung bean salad I made inspired by the Ulli’s?). She also ferments beets to make beet kvas, or milk to make kefir, or cabbage to make sauerkraut or kimchi.
Finally, Ulli strongly believes in the seasonal eating. She says, there is a good reason why things come out at the certain time of the year: not only to keep food exciting, but also to manifest “the wisdom of nature”. She gives a few examples, “Figs come out in August and available for about 1.5 months. Figs lubricate the large intestine that is very good to cleanse before we move into fall. We eat root vegetables in the winter as they ground us, keep us warm and give us energy We eat more leafy vegetables in the spring to cleanse the blood, cleanse the liver and remove mucus from the body”.
Her cooking classes started as an attempt to share her food philosophy and help her patients improve their well-being. Through her practice, Ulli realized that simply giving recipes to the clients who needed to revise their diets did not work out. So she thought she could help people change their eating habits by teaching them to cook dishes that are good for them. “The main aim of my cooking classes and the reason why I teach is to inspire people to make only one change in the way they eat”.
Ulli discovered that after seeing that the food is easy to make and tastes delicious people are more likely to re-create those foods at home. “When my cooking class students tell me that they are in love with a recipe, and it’s become a part of their repertoire, I feel my goal is achieved. To me it is the most amazing thing. That’s what I hope to do at my cooking classes: to inspire people to spend more time at their kitchens and to develop different relationships with food,” Ulli shares.
Ulli admits that it’s hard to source certain ingredients to sustain her eating and cooking approach in Istanbul after getting used to the availability of organic food and specialty ingredients in the US and Germany. And yet she feels privileged to be able to work with high-quality local ingredients in Turkey: in particular she loves wild mountain greens, variety of berries and vegetables available at the Istanbul food markets.
She thinks, however, that often times people living in Turkey forget to fully use the goodness of the locally grown ingredients, and home cooks stick to only few known ways to prepare them. She mentions a few such underrated ingredients in Turkey.
Ulli is fascinated by nettle: she calls it a superfood, while its use in Turkey is often limited to the börek filling. Nettle contains so many minerals; it is detoxifying for the liver and kidneys, strengthening to the bones, cleansing to the blood. “And it is so readily available. People should eat it like there is no tomorrow. People should eat it every day,” Ulli says.
Another unsung hero of the superfoods on the Istanbul food market stalls is beets, one of the best vegetables to cleanse the liver. Ulli is surprised that people don’t eat beets so much in Turkey. They might feed it to the horses and donkeys, and hence think of it as the animal food. Ulli regularly makes beet kvas, and as a Russian I testify that it tastes as good as the traditional deal (interestingly with no bread husks involved); beet kvas is an excellent probiotic beverage promoting the health of the liver and the blood.
Ulli also mentions artichokes, one of the best liver cleansers. “Artichokes come out in the spring, and by no coincidence spring is the best time to cleanse your liver as it is conjugated with all the heavy foods of winter,” Ulli explains.
Another Turkish superfood is pomegranate, rich in antioxidants, good for the blood and the heart. Ulli admits drinking pomegranate juice every morning, and she says it’s a crime not to do with as the fruit is so available and cheap in season.
Finally, Ulli talks about mung beans, detoxifier that removes heavy metals from the body; mung beans are widely used in the Ayurvedic therapies. They are hardly heard of in Turkey outside of Antep, and Istanbul aktars (specialty shops selling spices, herbs and anything dried) rarely carry them. Ulli says that almost always when she mentions mung beans to her patients or students in Istanbul she needs to show the beans.
Speaking of the Turkish pantry ingredients that Ulli discovered after moving to Istanbul she mentions reduced grape juice (pekmez), pomegranate molasses (nar eksisi) and tahini paste (tahin), world-class healthy ingredients she cooks with a lot. She is also impressed with the variety of Turkish cheeses, her favorites being tulum and fresh cheeses such as lor. Additionally, seeing a wide use of nigella seeds (çörek otu) in Turkey has inspired Ulli to include that ingredient in her own cooking more often. And finally, she shows me a jar of village-made poppy seed paste (haşhaş ezmesi) that she uses in baking or eat on the bread: if you like tahini, you should seek out the poppy seed paste by all means.
Ulli happily shares addresses of the places in Istanbul where she gets seasonal whole foods (all on the Asian side where Ulli lives and does most of her work).
Elta Ada
Yeni Fikir Sokak No:3/A Moda Kadıköy
Brings organic milk, yogurt, cheese, olive oil, chicken and beef (meat by request) from their organic farm in Gökçeada, Turkish island in the Aegean Sea.
Altınoluk
Güneşli Bahçe Sk No:16, Kadıköy Market
A small store at the Kadikoy market selling a range of local cheeses, village eggs, sometimes produce such as organic apples or wholewheat bread. They also carry good olives and high-quality olive oils including the flower of olive oil (exquisite tasting oil that drips from the crushed, not ground, olives). Ulli loves the enthusiasm of the staff that works directly with the farmers to bring high-quality products to the Istanbul dwellers.
Organic market at Özgürlük parkı in Göztepe
Runs on Wednesdays
Features organic herbs, greens, vegetables and fruits brought by the farmers from all over Turkey. Ully says that markets like that help the city stay in touch with the seasons, and as the market culture is still proliferating, seasonal eating is strong in Turkey.
Finally, Ulli shares the excitement of her new project, small-batch gluten free bakery “Ulli’s Kitchen” that she launched this March. Similarly to her cooking classes, the bakery started from the wish to help her clients. Ulli admits many of her patients have digestive disorders or problems digesting gluten, and there are hardly any resources available to them in Istanbul. Gluten-free baked goods are almost non-existent in the city right now making people with gluten intolerance feel discouraged and deprived.
From her own experience Ulli knows how hard it can be: when she got back from her trip to India in 2006 with a lot of parasitic infections and indigestion problems she was forced to find alternatives, and she started experimenting with gluten-free baking. Ulli aspires to offer something to those with little time, knowledge and motivation to source gluten-free ingredients and bake for themselves. Currently Ulli sells breads, cookies and nut mixtures. While she is happy to start as a small batch boutique operation, Ulli dreams that one day cafés, bakeries or even supermarkets in Istanbul could carry her products to offer their customers a choice.
what is the Turkish name for nettle?