summer: May 2008 Archives

We found ıspanaklı ve peynirli börek to be as common in Turkey as spanakotyropita is in Greece, and made a point of sampling as many as humanly possible, purely in the name of research of course.  They are essentially the same dish - a savoury pie made of multiple layers of ultra-thin pastry with a spinach and cheese filling.  Sometimes it’s just spinach, or just cheese, but I like it with both. 

They come in various shapes and sizes, depending on which country, region, town, village, bakery or home you’re in, and with different fillings.  The form here is nice and simple and works with the packets of filo dough we can find in shops in the UK.  I have made the filling purposefully generous in quantity and moist in consistency as I don’t like my börek dry.  The recipe is loosely based on two very different versions I had the opportunity to make with chefs in Turkey and Greece - Engin Akin in Istanbul and Dimitris Mantsios in Naoussa.

Erhan Şeker is a talented Turkish chef who makes great use of wild greens and herbs.  He cooks all sorts of weird and wonderful leaves, shoots and tendrils, most of which I wouldn’t know how to find back at home in the UK.  But one thing we can definitely find at home is stinging nettles.  In many areas they’re abundant.  And of course they’re free, and very good for you.  

This dish, called ‘çırpma’ in Turkish (meaning ‘mixed’, as I guess you could mix up all sorts of greens in here if you wanted, wild or otherwise), was expertly made for us in Erhan’s kitchen by his assistant Nesrin, using Erhan’s homemade goat ricotta. It’s the kind of comfort food that feels like it should be bad for you it’s so satisfying, but is actually incredibly good for you.  Wild greens are more nutritious than cultivated ones as they’re higher in antioxidants and other goodies that the plants must have plenty of in order to defend themselves from pests.

As you will see, the ingredient quantities in the recipe need some refining, so let me know how it goes if you make it.

While staying with Erhan Şeker on Turkey’s Aegean coast, we watched in awe as he whipped up dish after dish in front of us in no time at all.  Erhan likes to use plenty of herbs (his aim is to grow all 250 herbs in his ‘Herbs and Spices of the World’ book, and he’s making good progress), and he likes his food to be simple, fast and fresh.  He also loves inventing new dishes and trying them out on passing culinary anthropologists.  

To demonstrate these principles he went out and picked a bunch of fresh oregano, sliced up a couple of small courgettes and had this delicious salad on our plates in what seemed like seconds.  Cooking from scratch does not need to be labour intensive.  I think it would also work well with other herbs, such as basil, parsley or dill.  To keep the flavours simple, I’d just use one herb though, two at the most.