We have a little bit of a sweet tooth. And BOY have we come to the right place to indulge it! Everybody knows about Turkish delight, and baklava, but we’ve discovered infinite additional varieties of sweet things to eat. And Turks eat them all day long, ideally with many cups of tea or coffee. So we’ve had to put in a lot of effort to learn our way around the many pastry shops – we hope you appreciate our hard work. Let’s get down to the basics.
Turkish Delight
The origins of the ever-popular ‘Turkish delight’, aka lokum, are unclear: it has a documented existence since at least the late eighteenth century, but it has been around much longer. The base is starch (e.g. cornstarch/cornflour) and sugar, heated into gel, and then cooled. (Our sources suggest that this is the origin of jelly beans!) The varieties on offer are staggering. Like other foodstuffs in Turkey, they’ve taken a good thing and run with it. The classic form is brightly coloured-jellies dipped in powdered sugar. Occasionally with nuts. But the permutations of this basic recipe are endless: rose, mint, cinnamon, date, orange, lemon, pomegranate, bergamot… All of these can have hazelnuts, walnuts, pistachios, or chopped fruit. And they are sometimes wrapped around whole nuts and/or surrounded with nougat. For a while we thought these were all different things. But they all fall into the category of lokum.
We can’t, therefore, give you a Platonic definition of Turkish delight. But here’s a Wittgensteinian one: they’re served at room temperature. They’re all chewy, they’re all very sweet, and they’re all bite-sized (one eats them with the fingers, not a fork). They eat various versions of it everywhere in the Levant and throughout much of the Arab world.
Baklava is in a similar situation. It is certainly as old as the Ottoman empire (16th century CE), possibly as old as Cato (2nd century BCE; his recipe uses cheese) or the Assyrians (8th century BCE). Traditional baklava uses dozens of layers of filo dough (thin, flaky pastry), crushed nuts, and honey. (We’re very partial to orange flower water too). In Turkey, pistachios are more common than walnuts. Hazelnuts are common near the Black Sea but harder to find elsewhere.
Baklava comes in parallelograms, diamonds, triangles, rectangles, rolls, squares, mussel shapes, and chubby little fingers. There is also kadayif, which is made with shredded filo dough. You might garnish it with nuts, or cinnamon or cardamom. Serve it at room temperature, or warm (yum!). You could throw cream on top if you are calorie-deficient. And, because the Turks want everyone to have dessert, fancy shops offer gluten free and diabetic-friendly baklava.
Other
You can’t eat baklava and Turkish delight all day. (We know; we’ve tried!). Not least because then you’d miss out on all of the other ways Turks indulge their sweet tooth. The broad category of other sweet things includes lots of things you might not think of as particularly Turkish. But the café scene has been going on in Istanbul for centuries, so all of the classic European pastries make an appearance here, sometimes with an interesting twist. And Turks love ice cream too: we’ve eaten goat’s milk ice cream, which is very good, and also ice cream with mastic (a resin like pine) or sahlep (an orchid derivative). These latter make the ice cream chewy. Interesting, but maybe not a regular thing.
But our favourite category of Turkish desserts is that comprising candied vegetables. If you have ever candied orange peel, then you know the process. But we’ll bet you’ve never done it with pumpkin, eggplant, tomato, or walnut fruit. They each retain their original flavour but become sweeter versions of themselves. A bit like us in retirement: mostly the same, only a lot better!
