There are many great things about living in Istanbul. Not all of them pertain to food (or so we have been told). But this one does! We love pickles (turşu in Turkish). In fact, we think of ourselves as pickle aficionados. They are a smart way to preserve summer veggies – and fruits, it turns out – for the winter. But those clever Turks are light-years ahead of us, pickling things we hadn’t even dreamed of.
Even if you don’t like pickles that much (which is weird, frankly), you will be amazed at the kinds of things that make their way into brine in this wondrous land. The pickling agent is vinegar (typically grape) or lemon juice. Families feud over this, and we’re not experts. But we like the citrusy flavour of lemons a little better. Best of all, Turkish pickles are never, ever soggy: the crunch is part of the joy of them. We’ve been told that soggy pickles come from under-salting. We’ve also been told that pickles are great for a hangover, but we wouldn’t know anything about that.
The pictures below will give you some sense of the sheer variety of pickle options. And here is a list of pickles, usual and unusual, that we have tried in Istanbul, along with our impressions of them.
Old Favourites
- Cucumbers: just like Grandma used to make: lovely, sometimes sweet but never excessively so. Deeply satisfying!
- Cabbage: a solid product. But nothing earth-shattering. The pickled cabbage rolls are tasty, though.
- Carrots: two thumbs up – nice and crispy.
- Garlic and onions: we love these guys, and so naturally we love them pickled too.
- Peppers: sometimes hot, sometimes not. Also, occasionally stuffed with cheese. Great!
- Beets: among the best – sweet and tangy both, and you can’t beat the colour.
- Cauliflower: the florets are a completely different texture from the stems – yummy!
New and Improved Pickles
And here is a short list of some of the more unique kinds of pickles we have dug up:
- Almonds and apricots (the whole fruit): surprisingly good, but you might not recognise them for what they are.
- Apples and grapes: kind of what you’d expect, but also kind of wild.
- Tomatoes, red and green: spectacular – so this is what tomatoes are supposed to taste like?
- Aubergines/Eggplants: not a surprise, given how much Turks like this vegetable. A huge surprise given how delicious they are – they soak up flavours like mad, so are extraordinarily good.
- Pine cones (yes, pine cones) – we have seen these in jars but, tragically, been unable to try them.
- Lemons – a little like preserved lemons. Really excellent and we bet they’d be fantastic to cook with.
- Corn: sheer genius! Have we mentioned that we love corn?
- Kelek: apparently this is a small, unripe melon. We’ve never had it in unpickled form, but it’s dandy in brine.
Olives
After all that hullabaloo about pickles, you probably think we have nothing left to say. Not so! We also love olives, which are salt-cured before they are edible, so they are a species of pickle. There are dozens of varieties of these, black and green. We love the ones that have been soaked in beet juice to turn them red, or in blueberry juice to turn them bluish-purple. And we’re huge fans of the pitted and grilled ones. They appear at nearly every meal, and certainly at every meze meal, in at least one guise or another. Whole, pitted, chopped up, pureed into tapenade, stuffed with garlic or other goodies – we are big fans however they present themselves.
But No Liquid Pickles
Yes, we love pickles. But. There is one Turkish pickle varietal we haven’t managed to get behind yet. And that is pickle juice. We see people drinking this all over the place – it’s usually purply/red, such that you might mistake it for fruit punch. Luckily, it often has bits of veggies in it, which fruit punch rarely does in our experience. Maybe it’s the salt: we don’t know. But we can’t find it in our hearts to love this one. We’ll keep trying though (in very small doses).
