Summer Bounty at Alaçatı Farmers’ Market

“What can you expect of a local market at a popular upscale resort town?” I thought to myself heading out to the Saturday market in Alaçatı, a small Aegean town with the ubiquitous charms of wooden houses, cobble stone streets and small cafes with a bohemian flair. In my August newsletter I was ranting about the doleful state of affair in the Alaçatı dining as only a handful of restaurants have serious intentions to serve you good food, but I don’t plan to litter this particular space with drama. I’ll just say that my visit to the local market has convinced me that all the mediocre restaurants of the town must be shameless because they have access to some of the best ingredients in the country.

Aegean soil, dry and rocky, might not strike you as the most fertile, and yet it produces incredible variety of vegetables, fruits and legumes, all featured at the market catering to the Alalçatı locals and the summer house owners from Izmir and Istanbul. Reflecting the demands of the affluent city dwellers, the market vendors claim their produce, eggs and dairy to be natural and organic. This rather arbitrary claim might not be so overstated given the most of the market vendors in Alaçatı are individuals growers from the diversified farms, something we rarely see at the Istanbul food markets dominated by the mass-grown produce from the industrial-size monocrop farms.

Right now the market stalls are screaming late summer. Ripe melons from Ovacık, each one is so sweet and juicy that you don’t need to worry about choosing a good one. Gigantic crunchy serpent cucumbers to pickle and enjoy as is. Marbel-skinned eggplants from Manisa. Local tomatoes that look like tiny bulbs - yellow and red, to the delight of my husband cheering for Galatasaray. Fiery chilly peppers artfully packaged as color coordinated bouquets ready to be pickled. And figs, the currency of the Aegean summer, honey-sweet, plump and so soft that best eaten right by the stall. I take a kilo with me, and the vendor carefully arranges them on a small plastic tray so they survive a walk to the hotel.

Zucchini comes in every possible color and shape. Regular pale skin zucchinis, your all-purpose vegetable for the stews, fritters, savory pie fillings and all sort of frying. Round yellow and green once offering a good vessel for stuffing. Baby zucchini with blossoms attached, so admirable that the local chefs have been frantically instagramming them the whole summer. And then zucchini blossoms, an essential ingredient of the Aegean cooking, picked up early morning and stacked like ice-cream cones, at a steep price only a summer holidayier would not mind - 10 TL a pack.

You can’t find many renown Aegean greens at the market in summer as their bloom finishes by May to start again in October. But then here and there you spot bunches of forages nettles and generous piles of istiphno, a bitter green typically boiled or wilted in a pan and turned into salads, or sacks of samphire and kaya koruğu, abundant locally harvested seaweeds.

Bread is another pleasant surprise. On the Aegean you don’t find massive piles of bread on the dining tables. Many upscale Alaçatı restaurants would serve two or three small slices per person. But what kind of bread that is! If you close your eyes for a second and inhale that aroma, you get transported to a wheat field. Most of the local breads are sourdough, often wholemeal and mostly made with a local wheat flour.

The day before while dining at a popular restaurant I examined a small fragrant yellowish slice of bread with irregular holes. I didn’t even need to taste it to tell it was a real deal. “Where is your bread coming from?” I asked our waiter. “It’s made specially for us in Germencik,” the waiter referred to a town two hours drive away from Alaçatı, not far from Aydın. I contemplated how long a way the bread had made to reach our table.

At the market I learn that some breads travel even further. I approach a stall with home-cured green olives, fresh grapes, breads and dry beans and legumes. Initially olives get my attention: they are nearly of a kalamata size, brown in color and each has got an uneven tear that makes separating the flesh from the stone a breeze. They are köy kırma, a popular, but rather labor intensive way of curing unripe olives by smashing them with a stone first. I express my interest, and the vendor is quick to offer a sample. I inquire about the color that is darker than the green of the regular cured olives. “This is how you can tell our olives are naturally cured. No additives, but the color leaches a bit“. I ask for half a kilo with the brine to keep the olives from going moldy as we continue our road trip.

While I am marveling the olives, another female shopper takes interest in the grapes. “We don’t use any fertilizers to grow them,” the stall owner ensures her. I taste them and add a few vines to my purchase. Finally, I inspect the bread. “We make it from the wheat we grow,” a woman behind the stall points to a package of coarse bulgur on the stall, also for sale. “Sourdough?” “Of course,” the female bread maker seems to be surprised I could have assumed anything else. Huge loaves go for 10 TL a piece, which is a great value given the quality, but now I understand why Alaçatı restaurants ration 2 small slices per diner. “Where are you coming from?” “Alaşehir,” the female stall owner has made a 4 hour trip this morning to sell her produce and bread.

Some vendors don’t need to travel far and set the stall right in front of their stone houses like Bay Niko. If you are in Alaçatı, I challenge you to pass through his stall of homemade jams, foraged herbs and cooking condiments without stopping and marveling the jars, bottles and boxes with amusing contents. Here you find half a dozen varieties of local thyme, few types of cured capers, pickled seaweed, artichokes and asparagus, a range of honeys tasting of local thyme or citrus fruits, infused olive oils and essential oils, mastic from Sakız Adası and jams. Maybe it’s hard to impress Aegean folks with an extravagant homemade jam (after what I saw last year in Karaburun), but Bay Niko exceeds all extravaganza standards with his jams of cactus fruit (frenk inciri), unripe almonds or olives.

I am leaving the market vowing to come back in fall when the wild greens are in full bloom. This time I will be looking for a house with a kitchen.

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