Gözleme with Smoked Eggplant, Goat Cheese and Mint

Watching gözleme, a flat dough parcel, being made from the scratch is not unlike witnessing a miracle. A woman sits on the floor, legs crossed, in front of the low round table that serves her as a minimalistic kitchen counter. She deftly rolls paper-thin dough yufka with oklava, a long thin stick that a novice of Turkish cooking would hardly believe to be a rolling pin. The woman rolls a small ball of dough into a 10-15cm round, then she rolls the dough on the pin and unrolls it leaving the perfectly round sheet of dough slightly larger and thinner as it was just a moment ago. And so she rolls and unrolls, rolls and unrolls until she makes an impossibly thin, round and large sheet of dough.

Next to the woman is inverted griddle (saç) that is traditionally mounted right on the open fire in the Turkish countryside; nowadays fire is often replaced by gas or electricity. The woman rolls the round sheet of dough, sprinkles the stuffing its half - crumbled lor with parsley, spinach, minced meat or potato - flips over the other half and transfers it to the saç, brushes its top with oil, flips the gözleme over and cooks until the dark brown, almost black, irregular polka dots cover the surface of gözleme here and there. Literally, your bread and circuses. No wonder so many restaurant owners in Sultanahmet called for a woman from their home village to come to Istanbul and spend her days rolling and cooking gözleme to the amusement and delight of the public. The animation trick no long-legged Russian would beat.

You don’t have to be a foreigner to idealize gözleme - most Turkish city dwellers do. No wonder that in most parts of Anatolia it is the most readily available snack for a traveler that pairs unsurprisingly well with tea and provides both the comfort of a familiar food and the thrill of eating something local.

I used to rave about gözleme on my first trips to Turkey, but its mystery started to clear away as I started understand its key element - yufka - better. Yufka dough is readily available fresh at a specialized neighborhood shop (yufkaci) that makes all the urban home cooks look better and way more skilled than they are.

The simple formula of plain flour, water (at times milk) and pinch of salt creates one of the most essential and versatile item in the Turkish cooking. Yufka can be turned into a börek, a savory layered pastry, that ranges from finger food-spirited sigara böreği to tepsi böreği, a thrifty way to feed a crowd. Yufka is your flat bread when it is cooked to crispy on the sac and stockpiled (kuru yufka); before serving with a meal it is sprinkled with water to soften the crust. Fresh yufka is the cheapest and quickest bread: when I don’t have time to bake a loaf I mix flour and water, add a pinch of salt, roll as thin as possible, fold into a square parcel and cook for a few seconds on a cast-iron pan. Yufka can also be used as a cooking vessel when pilaf is cooked wrapped in the paper-thin dough. And finally, the thinner yufka gets you such exquisite desserts as baklava and katmer.

With so many ways to use the dough I am often fascinated how little diversity you will find without each category. Take gözleme - have you ever heard of gözleme stuffed with something else but the four traditional savory fillings? The comfort of eating familiar food never overrides the urge to experiment in my book, so I thought it is the good tome to revisit gözleme.

I can’t get over the memory of the eggplant dish that I ate at an Antakyan restaurant here in Istanbul when a hot eggplant roasted on the charcoal grill arrived to our table: it was slit open and its cavity was sprinkled with the tulum peyniri crumbles and coarsely chopped parsley. The combination of the tender smoked eggplant and pungent cheese punctuated by the fresh parsley was addictive enough for me to take over the dish served for the whole table and finish most of it. The other day the memories were refreshed by the recipe of the similar eggplant dish Liz, Tel-Aviv-based blogger, posted. So I thought it’s time to roast an eggplant or two and to give the rustic gözleme an urban makeover.