First Grocery Shopping in Istanbul

We’ve been nearly a week in Istanbul and we haven’t mentioned food yet. Which is unlike us, and silly: we’ve been doing almost nothing but eating since we got here (with the occasional mosque and bazaar in between). Our biggest struggle, in fact, is finding ways to eat more meals. The restaurants are excellent and cheap AND the food in the grocery stores is also excellent and cheap. So we buy food to cook, but we eat too much at lunch and are not hungry enough for dinner. (And they said retirement was easy!)

Here, however, is a quick summary of our grocery experiences to date in Istanbul (check out Norwegian groceries and also groceries in Limassol). There is a place to buy food about every twenty paces, whether that’s a kiosk selling bread or simit, a pide shop, a restaurant proper, a pastry shop, or a small grocery store. This makes Istanbul a deeply comforting place to live – we never worry about where our next meal is coming from. And so far, most things are comprehensible to us.

Fruits, Vegetables, Herbs and Spices

Turkish fruits and vegetables are astonishingly good. Every day we eat something simple and say to each other ‘so THIS is what tomatoes/eggplants/pomegranates/etc. are supposed to taste like’! We’ve been enjoying the fresh dill and mint too. We buy fruits, vegetables, nuts and olives from a little store a short walk away. It is owned by a lovely man named Osman who follows us around the store giving us plastic bags we don’t want. At first we were taken aback, but then we noticed that everyone else in the store shops much faster than we do. We think he thinks we need all the help we can get. (He’s not wrong.) We can’t wait to see what happens when we bring the bags back and try use them again!

Aside from eating the rainbow, we’ve been enjoying a wide range of spices known and unknown – but more on that when we write about the spice market, which we’ve become regulars at.

Meat and Dairy

We don’t cook a ton of meat at home – especially not here, where it is central to restaurant meals. But we’ve made chicken once so far. Our major misstep to date was in purchasing of milk. We know the Turkish word for this, so we felt really good about ourselves. Until John poured the milk into his morning tea and it curdled immediately. Hmm we thought; what?

Then we saw the word Ayran on the label. Ayran is the Turkish name for a cold salted yogurt drink prevalent across the Middle East, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe. It does contain milk, though, so yay us! We’re not fans of ayran, especially when it shows up uninvited in our tea. Still, as they say in Turkey, when life gives you ayran, make beet soup. Which we did, a kind of chunky borscht/mediterranean medley. it was delicious and meant we didn’t have to throw out the ayran. The milk situation is all sorted out. Another surprise has been the feta here, which is great but not especially salty. Weird, right?

Bread and Grains and Beans

We are in carb heaven: there’s tons of great bread, readily available. Pide in more kinds than we can fully fathom (thick and squishy but also fairly thin – maybe these are actually different things?); plus flatbreads you use for kebaps and huge crusty loaves of the kind we call ‘Italian’. And lots and lots of rice, couscous, and other grains we don’t quite know the names of yet, including one called ashure which is a central ingredient in Noah’s pudding, eaten across Central Asia. More on that soon. Looks like wheatberries; we hope we didn’t do anything sacrilegious by putting it in our beet soup.

Grocery Stores

Near us are a Şok, a Migros and an A101, all within about ten minutes’ walk. We don’t see huge differences among these stores yet, and we often go to the small, locally-owned store even closer when we want just a few things. About four days in, we found the super-supermarket (many things here grandly call themselves supermarkets but they are often small), a large Migros in the basement of a shopping mall. It has aisles and aisles of stuff. This includes a liquor aisle with excellent Turkish wines – we haven’t found a bad one yet! And lots of Middle Eastern cheeses, plus nuts, fresh olives, and a meat counter. And toiletries, which we don’t care much about. Still, it’s good to know they’re there when we need them.

So: the grocery news is all good from here!