Midye Dolmasi and Midye Tava

A STREET FOOD SHELL GAME

While mussels are much appreciated wherever they are found, only the Turks have been passionate enough to turn them into a standard street food. Hawked by vendors mainly around the busy Galata Bridge that spans Istanbul’s Golden Horn, the bivalves offer delectable nourishment for visitors taking in the action.
 

Two mussel specialties are readily available in this quarter bustling with pedestrians, hawkers, and automobiles. One is made by stuffing the nicely salty, tender mussels with a rice pilaf studded with pine nuts and raisins. Called midye dolmasi, these may be served hot or at room temperature as part of the meze course throughout the Middle East, but on these street corners they are sold chilled.

 

The second dish, midye tava, is piping hot: mussels deep-fried until crispy in a light and bubbly golden batter right before your eyes. They are usually dipped into an aromatic tarator sauce, a blend of walnuts, garlic, milk-soaked bread, and olive oil, brightened with lemon juice.

Simit

AN EDIBLE BRACELET

 

Jewelry or bagel-like baked treat? This may be the rst question that comes to mind when you spot this big, sesame-veneered, spiraled bread ring sold mornings on street corners in cities such as Istanbul, Athens, and Tunis. One whiff should provide the answer, for the aroma of these toasty rolls is hard to resist. Traditionally eaten with either yogurt or jam, they’d be excellent vehicles for lox and cream cheese as well.

In addition to their satisfying texture and flavor, simitler (in plural form) provide entertainment as their vendors vie for attention, some with the most alluring cries. Others carry baskets of the breads on their heads, stacking the simitler in ever more creative arrangements that may suggest the tower of Pisa, complete with the lean.

Lahmajoun

PIZZA BY ANOTHER NAME

 

 As snackable as the more familiar Italian pizza, lahmajoun begins with crisp, yeasty rounds or squares of what is essentially pita dough—pide in Turkish—topped with a richly thick sauce of ground meat, preferably lamb, that has been simmered with a rich blend of onions, parsley, crushed hot chiles, mint, garlic, green peppers, tomatoes, and perhaps a breath of cumin and allspice. Freshly baked and served hot, it is traditionally garnished with lemon wedges.

Just like pizza, cuts of lahmajoun range from slightly limp and tepid street-fair food to gourmet treats, the entire round or square baked to order and the sauce carefully prepared. And much in the way peoples take their slices—folded up into a sort of pizza sandwich—lahmajoun can be rolled up for snacking convenience. Cut into small squares or wedges, it works equally well as a refined cocktail canapé. As a quicker, crisper alternative to the freshly made dough, the sauce may be spread over the thin bread known as lavash and then glossed with melted butter and briefly heated in the oven.

Baklava

PASTRIES TO SATISFY A SULTAN

Ethereally light and crispy layerings of flaky phyllo dough brushed with melted butter and decked out with chopped nuts and oozing, honeyed syrup make baklava one of the world’s most seductive pastries.

Baked in shallow rectangular or round metal pans, the still-warm treat is doused—and thus crisped—with ice-cold sugar syrup or honey. Cut into diamond-shaped portions, it is to be nibbled alongside Turkish tea or coffee, in this case preferably unsugared.

Already a popular dessert in the Topkapi Palace in the sixteenth-century days of the Ottoman sultans, baklava was reported to be one of the favorite treats in the harem known as the House of Felicity (a title perhaps due only in part to the presence of pastries). The dessert evolved over the years, baked in varying forms and with fillings of walnuts, almonds, or pistachios, though always fragrant with cinnamon, lemon rind, and orange blossom water.

One of the most popular riffs on the theme is bourma, known as shredded wheat, a dizzyingly sweet and chewy delight in which shredded phyllo is wrapped around nut fillings before it is baked and drowned in syrup.

Finding fresh baklava is no easy matter, but it’s crucial. Kept too long, the pastry becomes limp and tough and the nuts turn rancid. If not in a reliable restaurant, find good baklava in busy Greek, Turkish, or other Middle Eastern bakeries where turnover is high. Avoid any that is precut and wrapped, boxed, or canned.