Results tagged “wheat”

Bread is big in Morocco.  A meal is not complete without bread, and it is always fresh and always good.  You wouldn’t catch anyone mopping up their tagine with white sliced ‘plastic’ bread.  It has to be the real deal.

Many of my memories from Morocco involve bread: women at home kneeling on the floor kneading dough in a gsar (wide earthenware dish); rounds of dough rising underneath warm sheepskins; children in the street ferrying loaves on planks of wood on their heads to and from the neighbourhood bakery; men baking thousands of loaves each day in huge wood-fired ovens, the smell wafting out onto the street; or women in mountain villages baking one at a time in  tiny home-made mud ovens at home; people arriving home with their freshly baked loaves for dinner, each marked with the family’s own signature gashes; the delicious combination of fresh bread and olive oil, enjoyed on arrival in many homes; the mother of the household tearing the warm disks into rough wedges and plonking them in front of each diner, shouting “eat, eat!” 

It's ridiculous to try to sum up Turkish cuisine in 10 flavours.  Turkish cuisine is hugely rich and infinitely varied, not least because a) Turkey's absolutely enormous - have you looked at a map recently? - comprising three different coastlines, high snowy mountains, very hot, dry plains and lush wooded hillsides, among other things, and b) its cooking has been influenced over the centuries by Mongolian, Chinese, Persian and Greek cultures and then, through the enormous Ottoman empire and its trade routes, many more, including Moroccan and French.

But I'll give it a go...

While you may well find rice or potatoes as the starch on your dinner plate, and plenty of dried beans and pulses cooked up in your stews, and even desserts, it is wheat that has to be the principal starch-provider of Turkey.  After all, it was in ancient Mesopotamia, and probably around the modern-day town of Diyarbakır in eastern Turkey, that wheat was first domesticated by man more than 10 thousand years ago.