It is not easy to do it well, only ~5% of producers making it really enjoyable I can say. As a Turkish foodie with a Chef wife, Turkish Delight is not something we consume regularly. Unless it is very well done like the ones Haci Bekir produce. It's just a companion to Turkish Cofee most of the time. It's very easy to make a bad Turkish Delight. On 90% of my tastings, I don't even finish it, but Haci Bekir and some other shops are making it perfect which you do eat without coffee also.
I have the same thing with baklava, 90% doesn’t taste good but you always keep looking for the 10% that does. Whenever baklava is on the menu, I need to try it, but none of the fancy restaurants I’ve been to in the US do it really well (the $4 per piece ones), but the cheap corner store on Post & Powell in SF surprisingly has one of the best (and they get it from some bakery in Oakland but refuse to tell me which one).
I have the fotunate/unfortunate experience of growing up eating home-made baklava. I grew up going to an Eastern Orthodox church and most of the congregation was either immigrants or descendants of immigrants (including myself, great-grandmother was from Syria, along with some of my grandmother's siblings. My grandmother happened to be born in the US).
I used to find most of it disappointing at best. My tastes have loosened up quite a bit since then because not only did I give up church, but I'm far removed from the area now.
Are you saying the home-made baklava was usually disappointing or the bought baklava was? The middle eastern ladies at my Orthodox parish make delicious baklawa.
Totally agreed when it comes to baklava. I never had it done right in the US, and definitely not in the Bay Area. The best Turkish food I had was in Kirkland, WA and the best baklava I had was in Turkey at Gulluoglu.
Exactly this. Many of the foods we get outside of our cultural norms, just don't compare to the real thing - which in turn drives people to dislike the real deal.
There's an enormous difference between the Turkish Delight sold in the grocery stores here, versus Haci Bekir. The same is true of the Arak I buy and the jahnoun. Lord what I wouldn't give for real jahnoun - the frozen stuff is such shite.
There are two typical ways to make Turkish delight.
One is the "easy western" way - sugar, rosewater, gelatin.
This is obviously not halal.
The second is the "hard authentic" way: sugar, rosewater, cornflower.
Cooking confectionery is a real trial. For Turkish delight, you heat a large amount of sugar for a very long time making it hover between a very tight temperature tolerance.
If you go over you make toffee, if you go under you make caramel.
After a few hours, you mix in the cornflour slurry, mix for a few more hours, and then pour to set.
In my experience, your cornflour lumps (three hours wasted), the temperature spikes or drops (fail), sticks (fail) or you get hot sticky napalm on extremities.
However, if you pull it off it is delightful, and your Turkish friends will be very impressed!
Thanks for the recipes! That said my personal opinion is that, recipes are best communicated when they are as precise and clear as possible. Therefore, words like a "few hours", "cook it for sometime", "large amount" etc. would generally give very little detail to try. I do understand that not everything can be precise but in those situations it is important to communicate WHY one can not be precise. Otherwise, it is very difficult to follow recipes.
Hey! Unfortunately it's a bit hard to find English resources - both in the sense that there aren't many to begin with but also the books are difficult to get hold of.
Classical Turkish Cooking by Ayla Algar is, well, a classic. People often think the recipes aren't descriptive enough. But also it's quite comprehensive and has a lot of history too.
Aegean Flavors by chef Didem Senol is a wonderful take on aegean cuisine in Turkey - highly related to greek food.
Oklava by chef Selin Kiazim is a bit more of a modern / upscale restaurant take - she runs one.
Claudia Roden's book is not only about Turkey but quite great.
Ali Muhiddin Haci Bekir in Sirkeci is the defacto choice - their store still looks exactly the way it must have looked in the early 1900s. Cafer Erol in Kadikoy has a very nice storefront and a LOT of variety, and pretty decent hard candy ("akide") too. Divan is more of a western patisserie and has many locations, but good. Cemilzade is the off-beat version of Haci Bekir, also in Kadikoy. A lot of options: pomegrenate, saffron, twice baked, clotted cream ("kaymak"), coffee, coconut, pistachio, almost any fruit imaginable etc etc.
Just don't get the boxed stuff, and get a lot of variety of flavors. Also I seem to be the only person who hates the rosewater, but maybe that's just me.
For baklava, it's really a labor of love and there's a lot of great old and small shops. Gulluoglu used to be great and is still quite OK, but feels a but mass produced now. Smaller options are Köşkeroğlu, kafadaroğlu etc, but I don't know if it's worth seeking out especially - just duck into whatever small shop that seems busy during the day.
Probably what might be a better experience is trying /unfamiliar/ desserts: Kunefe is crispy shredded puff pastry with cheese in it, doused in syrup, served HOT with pistachio on top. Tulumba is the turkish take on churros. Halva is made of tahini and sugar, and is getting more popular in the US. Kazandibi is pudding that's been caramelized / burnt at the "bottom of the pan" - traditionally the gelatin in it comes from chicken breast (you can't taste it). More often it's now the "fake" version, still delicious. Lokma is turkish fried dough. Kabak tatlisi is made of pumpkin. There's so much to try, just get the stuff which you don't know what it is.
One thing to remember is that Turkish sweets are quite sweet - you're only meant to have one small piece. Of course that won't stop many of us from getting a whole plate :-) Usually you can ask for a half portion at a shop.
Finally if you're near Kadikoy, hit up Ciya too - regional foods from across Turkey that you can't find in many other places.
True! It's popular in the middle east in general, and I'm sure it made it over with immigrants somehow, but up until a few years ago I only saw tahini and halva in the "ethnic" foods aisle, until tahini became a popular health food / salad thing and now you see it in restaurants, and now I'm seeing more and more cafes and bakeries with halva cookies, halva lattes, etc etc - that's all I mean.
Also you might also like tahin pekmez - which I haven't seen around at all yet: 3/4 tahini and 1/4 molasses mixed together for a spread - on toasted bread. Best warming winter / snowy weather comfort food ever! :-)
Given the “old world” nature of it, I have to think that it’s one of those things that was really amazing at the time, but just can’t compare to modern sweets, so you can’t really get a good perspective on it. Like if you had watched a movie like Guardians of the Galaxy before ever seeing Star Wars, you’d wonder what the big deal was about Star Wars.
In the same token there are a lot of modern sweets that I find to be overly sweet. For example a lot of the Starbucks sweet coffee drinks are so sweet that they make me gag.
I find most modern sweet things to be disgustingly sweet, but Turkish Delight is one of the few sweets that I really like because it's not overwhelmingly sweet.
Frequently they'll take something that I like and add a couple of pumps of vanilla to it, then discontinue the original recipe.
There was a cold brew with sweet cream that they had last year which was a really good cold drink that wasn't overly sweet. So this year they replace it with a cold brew with vanilla sweet cream and now it has two pumps of vanilla syrup in it in addition to the sweetness of the sweet cream. So now it's disgustingly sweet and tastes cloyingly of vanilla.
I pretty much only get lattes and drip coffee there now.
You can just ask them not to put in the vanilla; starbucks is impressively malleable, and removing a syrup is likely barely on their complexity meter, given the hyper-specific orders I’ve seen people give
> "one of those things that was really amazing at the time, but just can’t compare to modern sweets"
Taste is subjective/cultural. I visited Istanbul early this year and brought back home (to São Paulo, Brazil) some boxes of Turkish Delight, several flavors, and they run out really fast with family and friends. Everyone loved it.
Personally I'm not a fan of modern overly sweet treats.
I think also people severely underestimate how bland and repetitive the average person's diet used to be at the turn of the century, before food engineering and junk food. Meat and sweets were a luxury in a lot of places. Haute cuisine was reserved for the richest.
I read somewhere (can't recall where) that the fact that it's not that good was exactly why CS Lewis chose it. Even in his time it was considered "meh."
The notion being that people need little motivation to sell out.
I used to hate Turkish Delight until I bought my girlfriend some posh Turkish Delight for her birthday from Hotel Chocolat.
This stuff was basically pure Turkish Delight in powdered sugar, and it was lovely. It had a hint of lemon and rose, had a nice consistency, and while the sugar was annoying it was a lovely (albeit pricy) treat.
Her niece and nephew absolutely loved it too, and between the four of us the box didn't last too long. They weren't fans of the standard mass-produced chocolate one though. They thought it was too strong, and didn't like the fact that it was "like jelly".
As a kid growing up in the US, I liked “Aplets and Cotlets” a lot, so I could really empathize with Edmund. I suppose that if my parents had given us rose or bergamot lokum it would have been a very different story.
It's funny, I adore rosewater and pine Turkish Delight, but think of Aplets and Cotlets as that weird, bad candy that comes with your rations in the Boy Scouts.
