Maybe you are settling in Istanbul, maybe you live abroad with a Turkish spouse and feel curious to learn Turkish cooking, or maybe you got captivated by the local cuisine while traveling in Turkey and would like to recreate its taste back home. Besides looking up Turkish cooking recipes you may be interested in learning to use Turkish cooking utensils. Here are seven great tools to make your Turkish cooking experience fun and its outcome — perfect.
1. Sahan: Morning Eggs Taste Better
There has been a long-standing tradition of using copper for making cooking utensils in Turkey. Copper is a great heat-conductor meaning it evenly spreads the heat and keeps it very well so no wonder that it is such a desired material for a cooking utensil. Unfortunately copper can be poisonous when interacting with food. The solution is line it with tin to make copper safe for cooking. But then another trouble comes: if you have slightly scratched the tin and it goes off you need to either reline your Turkish cooking utensil or from now on use it as a flower pot. Hence using copper is too much trouble (and expense) that’s why the tradition of copper Turkish cooking utensils is kept by a few dedicated cooks.
Not than it comes to sahan, a frying pen with two little handles which has too much of an important function to be excluded from the Turkish cooking utensil club too easily. You can hardly have proper Turkish breakfast at home or outside without using sahan for making fried, «sunny-side up» eggs or menemen, Turkish take on scrambled eggs.
If you have a Turk around you better keep sahan handy for also preparing late night (and early morning) sucuk, or round cuts of spicy sausage fried in the unbelievable amount of butter. The bottom line: eggs and sucuk (or two of them together for more goodness) do taste better in sahan.
2. Közmatik: That Smoky Roasted Eggplant
I used to sigh every time I had a meze of roasted eggplant at a restaurant. There is no way to come up with this perfectly charcoal-roasted smoky taste at home I thought. You can burn your eggplant in the oven little bit and then bake wrapped in aluminum foil but eating it will only make your realize how far you got from that perfect restaurant flavor. But then I have figured that Turkish housewives had long come up with an amazingly handy device you can use to roast eggplant (red peppers, chestnuts and what not) at home called közmatik.
Közmatik is a round tray with horizontal cuts at the bottom: the cuts slightly overlap meaning that your eggplant will be burned but juices will not be escaping to the stove top. Közmatik usually holds 4 medium-size eggplants and it normally takes about 30 minutes to roast them. Needless to say you will be giving them some attention and turning them with tongs now and then to roast them evenly.
Once grilled you can chill your eggplants, peel them, mash and season with garlic, lemon juice and olive oil and that would be your wonderful home-made eggplant meze with that signature charcoal smoke. Genius yet so simple, if you have közmatik.
3. Cezve: Treat Your Guests to Coffee
To deserve the status of a graceful host in Turkey you should be able to treat your guests to a cup of good Turkish coffee. Turkish coffee is usually offered at the end of the meal as a sign of hospitality. When the meal is over and the dessert is eaten you are signaling to your guests, «We are delighted by your company and we don’t want you to leave yet». That’s why you can’t really get away without having a good cezve (jez-veh) at home (well, if you are Turkish coffee maniac you may well consider investing in an Arçelik machine making Turkish coffee just like your espresso machine does).
Cevze is a copper pot with wide bottom, thin neck and a long handle to make Turkish coffee on the stove top or charkcoal. The shape of this cooking utensil is designed to help decently thick foam form on top which is an essential attribute of good coffee.
Cezve vary in size depending on the number of portions. I find it practical to keep few smaller cezve at home so that you could treat yourself when needed and scale up with using 2 or 3 cezve for the guests. Do you know that this Turkish cooking utensil is a multi-purpose one: it is very handy when it comes to heating up milk for your coffee (not the Turkish one, please) and boiling an egg very quickly?
4. Çaydanlik: No Tea Bags Ever Again
Just as with drinking Turkish tea making it is definitely a ritual. Making Turkish tea is a very accurate metaphor for life in Turkey — be it running a household, undertaking a business venture or socializing. Because it takes time but the outcome can be so rewarding when done right.
Key to the strong flavor of Turkish tea is çaydanlık, double teapot with tea brewed in the upper chamber as it is getting steamed over the boiling water in the bottom one. Great way to keep the tea hot as long as the guest are drinking it or as long as the breakfast goes on.
Double teapots come in a whole range of materials and types. You can get an electric one which looks like a regular electric kettle with a smaller one stacked on top. You can buy traditional one made of copper with patters stamped on the surface. I would recommend high-quality stainless steel if you planning to use it yours often.
For your double teapot you should get either a small stainer (as big as the neck of the Turkish tea glass) to use as you pour the tea or a little metal strainer-box which you can use to place the tea-leaves inside the upper kettle so they don’t get on your way when serving the tea.
5. Cheese cutter: Perfect Breakfast Platter
People often time ask me pointing at a cheese-vendor stall with massive white blocks towering up, «Is this all feta?» To the same extent that Oreo and Maria can be both called cookies«, I usually reply. White cheese, a staple in Turkey, comes in great variety: it differs in milk (caw, sheep, goat), its fat content and hardness and definitely the aging methods (think of that tulum aged in the goat skin).
What is common about the Turkish white cheeses is they are rather tricky to cut and tend to break or crumble. So when preparing your Turkish breakfast you want to be gentle with your white cheese and make sure it comes in neat slices rather than in crumbles.
Those in the know use a wired cheese cutter which is essentially a u-shape metal handle with a thin steel wire. Sometimes a longer handle can be added. The surface contacting with cheese is reduced to the thin wire meaning the cheese will not stick or break. Also known as a wire butter knife this Turkish cooking utensil can be used to cut other cheeses with a fragile texture such as Roquefort.
6. Rice strainer: Pilaf Gets Fluffy
Pilaf is a backbone of Turkish cooking and your ability to turn it is rather indicative for your overall Turkish cooking skills. Good Turkish pilaf is perfectly fluffy and never-ever sticky. There are a few tricks to arrive to that fluffy results: soaking and washing the rice is one of them. By doing so you let the rice puff which means it will be cooked evenly without turning into mesh with its cores still hard and it will be free of any substances that can be added during the milling process and loose starch which eventually makes the rice less sticky.
As you soaked the rice (in hot water with a pinch of salt; for an hour), washed and now about to drain it you need to get red of water excess because if you have too much you will break another rule of making fluffy rice — watch out for the right amount of water. Instead of using a regular sieve Turks have come up with more efficient solution — rice drainer, a round metal tray with holes small enough to keep the rice but large enough to let the water drain. You typically soak the rice, then place it on the drainer and wash it well under the cold running water. Then you set it aside for a while for the excessive water to drain.
7. Mortar and Pestel: Your Touch of Spice
If you do Turkish cooking you will be using spices to some extent. While Turkish cuisine does not boast the wealth of Middle Eastern spices or the hotness of the Indian ones it does have its spicy notes. Mind-blowing variety of peppers from Anatolia, herbs from the Mediterranean, fragrant cumin from the South and a subtle notes of saffron from the far away lands are hard to disregard when creating a genuinely Turkish dish.
I am a big advocate of buying spices as sticks, seeds, berries or corns and then grinding them as you cook. Aroma of freshly ground coriander seeds or allspice berries sets you in the mood for kitchen experiments and always adds a bit of miracle to your dish. Mortar and pestel requires some effort but may be still better than some electric grinders as the latter may heat up the spices too much and hence degrade their flavor.
Mortar and pestel is perfect to ground fennel, coriander, and cumin seeds, allspice berries, peppercorns or preparing a mix of spices. Adding little bit of salt can help facilitate the grinding. In addition you can use mortar and pestel to crash garlic or soft nuts (such as walnuts). In Istanbul you would mainly find mortar and pestels made of either wood or brass alloy: when choosing the former keep in mind that you can use it for only dry ingredients.
Where to buy Turkish kitchen utensils in Istanbul:
Shops at Hasırcılar Caddesi in Eminönü have fantastic deals for basic Turkish cooking utensils: look out for wooden spoons and spatulas, copper coffee sets, steal teapots and clay dishes. Those in the know including owners of some professional kitchens come here for their shopping. If you are interested in purchasing a 50 liter pot or a grill to make what locals call «mangal» (BBQ) this is also the right place to come. Just in case.
If you don’t plan a big kitchen utensil shopping or don’t care for deals you don’t need to travel far: at every market at a major neighborhood there is a kitchen utensils shop. It may look very tacky from outside but you will be able to find daily use utensils for your kitchen.
As for the branded shops I love Esse for their high-quality kitchen utensils and specifically — great double tea-pots. For less traditional kitchen utensils I can highly recommend Tefal outlets which are conventionally scattered all over Istanbul — I frequently check the deals for pans and pots at ours in Kadıkoy.
