Whenever we travel we like to do something foodie, whether it be a fancy meal or some kind of tour. Our recent visit to Turkiye was no exception. The food that we had over the whole trip was amazing, but one of the first things we did was a walking tour.
Istanbul is a pretty special city and it is proud of the fact that it has one foot in both Europe and Asia, and this walking tour had elements on both sides.
After meeting at a location near to the Spice Markets, the group of 9 made our way through the markets collecting various different ingredients for the first tasting, which ended up being a full Turkish breakfast. This is a tour that you need to come hungry for. I really didn't even need the hot chocolate that we started with!
This Turkish breakfast really set the scene for all of the breakfasts that we had throughout the tour. It introduced us to a number of different elements that I might not otherwise have tried and we continued to eat them throughout the period we were there.
The breakfast that we had included grilled olives, several different cheeses including tulum cheese, simit (looks like a bagel but has molasses added to it and is covered in sesame seeds), red pepper paste , pasturma (pastrami), menemen (scrambled eggs with onion and tomato), hazelnut paste and honey and kaymak (which is a type of clotted cream) all washed down with turkish tea.
Everything was really delicious. Actually, I didn't try the olives because I don't like them, but everything else was really delicious. The real revelations were the hazelnut paste and the honey and kaymak. We are all familiar with Nutella which is the mix of chocolate and hazelnut but this was just hazelnut flavoured and it was so good! Interestingly, this was only served with the breakfast in Istanbul. Once we got out of the city we didn't see it again.. However, the honey and kaymak (clotted cream) is something we saw pretty regularly.
The thing with the honey and kaymak that was such a surprise to me is that I generally don't like honey that much. I will have it in small amounts but certainly it's not a topping that I reach for as a general rule, but as a combination with the simit.....and it turns out other types of bread....so good!
After our breakfast we make our way down to the waterfront and caught a ferry over the Bosphorus to the Asian side of the city in the area of Kadıköy where we wandered through a market area making various stops.
The first stop was at a restaurant where we tried Beyran soup which is a regional breakfast soup. It includes pieces of lamb in the tomato based soup. This is where we also tried ayran which is a sour milk based drink that we saw all over Turkiye. That one might be a bit of an acquired taste. More palatable was the lahmacun which is a Turkish pizza style dish but you roll it up to eat.
As we were walking our guide pointed out a number of kokoreç stores. When he explained what it was I wasn't sure if I would want to try it, but when in Istanbul.... kokoreç is basically lamb intestines which is wrapped around different types of offal and then grilled. The way we had it was very finely chopped and served on bread. It was quite tasty, although it's not something that I would go out of my way to have again.
You may have noticed that there is a lot of bread in this food, and we weren't done yet. Our next stop was to have an Iskender Kebab. I guess I really only though that there were kebabs, but there are multiple different versions. What sets this one apart is that the pita bread is at the bottom of the plate so by the time you are get to it, it has been soaking in all the juices. When it is served, there is also a flourish of butter sauce added. It was so good!
The next stop was something I have never seen before. It was a pickle shop, but it isn't just your normal pickles. The window display included things like pickled avocado, corn and all sort of other things. I don't like pickle so this wasn't a stop for me. It also might be another acquired taste, but it did look very pretty! We saw pickle stores all over the city where people just buy a cup of pickles and juice and they just eat it like that!
We couldn't complete a tour without having proper Turkish coffee and Turkish Delight, and then our final stop was a dessert shop where we got to try Turkish ice cream (which is dondurma) and baklava. We ended up going to this chain of dessert shops multiple times throughout our time in Istanbul. The dondurma is delicious, so creamy, but it has a very different texture to our ice cream, to the point that it is possible to eat it with a knife and fork. Because of the ingredients it doesn't melt in the same way and it has a kind of chewy texture.
I mentioned above that I don't generally love honey. The same is true of nuts, and yet I ate baklava at every opportunity, and honey and nut are a big part of baklava! The guide did tell us that you should eat baklava upside down which was interesting!
That was the end of the a very interesting day. The tour itself lasted around 5 hours, and the guide was very approachable and knowledgable. He also shared plenty of tips about good places to eat. Once the tour as done we had the opportunity to hang around a bit longer in Kadıköy which is what we chose to do. We then caught the ferry back to Kabataş which was very close to where we were staying.
it was a really fun, informative and filling day! We did out tour through a company called Yummy Food Tours and we would totally do another tour with them!
Saturday - Away
Sunday - Away
Monday - Presure Cooker Spag Bol
Tuesday -Pork chops with mash and gravy
Wednesday - Beef and Broccoli
Thursday - Chicken Katsu Curry
Friday - Bacon, mushrooms and eggs on toast
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