Some photos

One of the days when we were in Istanbul we went out to a restaurant where I know many of the staff. Last year my mother-in-law really enjoyed the bread there, so her sole request when she knew I was going back to Istanbul was that I learn how to make the bread so I could teach her. Before the students arrived I had arranged with Yunus, one of the waiters at the restaurant, that I would come back some day and he would teach me to make the bread. So ... one evening when we'd eaten dinner there, Amanda and I stayed behind browsing in a store for cherry tea. After we were done we ran into Yunus who told us this was a good time for him to teach us to make the bread. Amanda was game, so we went into the kitchen of the restaurant and he and the cook proceeded to teach us the finer points of making "puffy bread." The cook was quite insistent that there was an art to rolling out the dough, and Amanda was putting too much muscle into it - it's a smooth, light twisting motion without much pressure (umm hmm ... obviously it takes practice). The dough needs to be thin before it goes into the oven. The idea of oven temperature or proportions of ingredients seemed foreign to them, so we got a list of ingredients and the idea that the oven needs to be hot (our closest comparison to the oven is something like a wood-fired pizza oven, which apparently many people in Turkey have in their homes). My mother-in-law and I will play around with the recipe and see if we can come up with something that approximates this bread. I'm going to try broiling it to see if it works (failing that, perhaps a metal box over a campfire?) One of the ingredients you might not expect to find in bread is yogurt (yogurt shows up in a lot of things in Turkey). There's also a coating of egg yolk and carbonated water and black sesame that goes on top right before it goes into the oven.

So, after the bread was rolled out thin, we baked it for five minutes and here Amanda is removing it from the oven:


Then Yunus brought it out to us and we ate it with feta and spiced butter (and tea on the side) as a sort of post-dinner snack. Yumm!

If anyone is interested, we'll let you know if we can replicate it.