breads and cakes: May 2008 Archives

I named these Turkish syrup-drenched cakelets ‘hedgehogs’ due to their spiky appearance and potential appeal to kids.  Making them is great fun, involving an unusual use for a colander (a ‘kalbur’ in Turkish).  I helped make them in Erhan Şeker’s restaurant kitchen, under the watchful eye of his assistant Nesrin.  Impossible to find in restaurants, kalbura bastı are commonly made in Turkish homes.  So for a true taste of Turkish home-baking, get out your colander...

The ingredient quantities in this recipe probably need some refining, so please let me know how it goes if you make it.

We ate maybe a hundred gözleme each in Turkey.  It is a kind of flatbread (yufka), folded up around a filling such as cheese, potato or spinach, and cooked on a metal dome (saç) over a fire until the outside is browned and crispy and the inside is soft and hot.  They are absolutely delicious and make the perfect breakfast or lunch hot snack. 


In Cappadocia I spent one hilarious day making them with three expert women in the village of Göreme.  Gülcan, Hamide and Hatice showed me how to make the fillings, knead and roll the dough, fold it up in a parcel around the filling and then cook it over the tandır fire.  Here is the recipe and several short video clips.  Warning: some clips contain explicit language (in Turkish).

This session around the traditional tandır oven is now sadly a rare occurrence in Cappadocia, where it was once a very socially significant event for the women of the cave houses, and it was probably Hatice's last.  You can read the full story here.