Hunting the Bounty of Turkish Markets

      A very precious friend and his lovely wife live in Turkey, shared this article with me with their own comments at the end.
      As I read this I realized just how little variety we have in our diets, it's all the same, non-vine ripened, tasteless, cardboard food with little to zero vitamins and minerals left. Is it a wonder that this country is now 60% morbidly obese and 50% of this country has some type of cancer?

[This article is from: Hunting the Bounty of Turkish Markets - NYTimes.com 5/29/13 13:54 http://travel.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/travel/hunting-the-bounty-of…markets.html?nl=travel&emc=edit_tl_20130525&_r=0&pagewanted=print  May 24, 2013]

Hunting the Bounty of Turkish Markets

By ROBYN ECKHARDT

     On a fine April morning I drove slowly in Marmaris, trailing a woman pulling a wheeled trolley. It was Thursday and I hoped her destination was the weekly market that had drawn me to this tidy resort city on the southwestern coast of Turkey. Soon enough she merged into a stream of pedestrians flowing toward a concrete structure covering an entire city block. At 10:30 a.m. the Marmaris Thursday market was in full swing, arcades packed with shoppers perusing tables heaped with produce, cheeses under glass and seafood glinting in the sunlight.

        I was traveling the region having been inspired by a cookbook, “Aegean Flavours,” written by Didem Senol, a New York-trained Turkish chef whose penchant for cooking in season is on display at her Istanbul restaurant, Lokanta Maya, and her tiny cafe there, Gram. Many of the book’s recipes are  informed by the time Ms. Senol spent heading the kitchen at her father’s

hotel, the Dionysos, on the Bozburun peninsula near Marmaris, where she shopped the city’s market and others in the region.

     “I learned that when a vendor knows you she’ll pull something special — a jam, a cheese — from beneath her stall,” she told me last winter in Istanbul. And so we planned a spring trip centered on those markets, which are especially abundant with foraged leafy vegetables this time of year,

and the restaurants that best make use of them. But just 10 days before our trip Ms. Senol, seven months pregnant, e-mailed that her doctor had

nixed travel. She urged me to go anyway, guided by introductions and a list of her favorite spots.

      I flew from Istanbul to Izmir and drove the easy 154 miles south to Marmaris, where I met Ms. Senol’s father, Ahmet, and his wife, Rim, at the market.

      “What you see here you won’t find in a supermarket,” he said as we drank tea steps from a tub of kirmizi karades, small coral-pink shrimp in season only until June. While Ahmet bought seafood for lunch, Rim and I shopped. Spring was in full bloom: thumbsize morels and globe artichokes hung by their stems over mounds of young favas and peas. There were bunches of mallow, cress, purslane, dandelion, nettles and chicory, and bundles of pencil-thin wild asparagus. A heady perfume hung over a row of wooden bins filled with strawberries. We tasted pine and flower honeys, and I bought half a dozen Marmaris pogaca, flaky rectangles filled with mild fresh cheese. It was an auspicious beginning to my quest.

      After a 45-minute drive along a corkscrew road, I arrived at Dionysos, where Ahmet and his staff were readying lunch, a test run for the season’s start in three weeks. At a table set outside the kitchen we ate smoked mackerel pâté and early pink tomatoes dressed with purple basil and

Dionysos’ own cold-pressed olive oil; kirmizi karades (the shrimp I’d spied at the market) in a light, bright tomato sauce; and sole fillets, rolled and skewered with bay leaves and lemon and grilled over wood. Almonds, another Aegean crop, flavored ice cream served with strawberries. “Not quite there yet,” Rim said of the strawberries, pushing her plate aside, though I finished mine.

     The next day I backtracked toward Marmaris and turned south for Selimiye, a fishing hamlet curled around a glassy bay. After several passes I found Sardunya, a low-key restaurant (there is no signage) right on the water, with comfortable rooms set around a fruit tree-shaded garden behind. When I asked the owner, Muhammet Ozdenir, to whom I should credit the food, he replied, “I have friends in the kitchen; we all cook.”

     At sunset I sat by the water and sampled a dozen meze. The most memorable featured vegetables I’d coveted in Marmaris: turp otu (wild radish leaves) blanched with vinegar; earthy chard; samphire cooked to retain its bite and dressed with lemon, crushed garlic and Mr. Ozdenir’s own olive oil; and sari kiz otu, a bitter green tamed by sweet caramelized onions.

Grilled octopus straight off a neighbor’s boat, served simply in a pool of olive oil and dusted with dried thyme, was as yielding as butter.

Saturday brought the longest leg of my trip, but first I detoured to Datca, on an arid peninsula just north of Bozburun. After passing acres of almond groves, I found the Saturday market, where cagla, the tart, crispy green almonds that enjoy a sliver of a season, were sold next to bags

of mature nuts and almond-stuffed oven-dried figs. I cobbled together a picnic — Bergama cheese, dense village bread, tomatoes and unsalted black olives — and hit the road for Urla, a one-street town with a cozy harbor on the Cesme peninsula, some 230 miles north.

     In the morning I met Ahmet’s school friend Hasan Yamanlar for Urla’s fish auction, which happens every morning (weather permitting) beneath an octagonal canopy steps from the boats. Then I walked five minutes to what Ms. Senol had described as “one of the most inspiring markets” she’d ever seen. With only 30 or so stalls it nonetheless held surprises at every turn:

green figs for marmalade, four varieties each of thyme and sea grass, young leaves of melengec (a tree in the pistachio family) and tangles of mixed wild leaves, shoots and herbs labeled “kavurmalik” (for sautéing) or “boreklik” (for borek, phyllo pastries). At the rear of the market a woman griddled gozleme, paper-thin flatbread filled with whey cheese and wispy wild fennel

fronds.

      More surprises awaited that night at Yengec restaurant on Urla’s harbor, popular for its tremendous meze selection. Trying all 102 was out of the question, so I picked a few: nettles “cooked” in isot pepper, wild fennel simply dressed with lemon, and kaya korugu, a succulent known in English as rock samphire, brined in verjus. In ancient Tire, an inland town some 25 miles from Ephesus, my guides at the Tuesday market, said to be Turkey’s largest, were the Cakirs — father Lutfi and son Serkan — of Kaplan Dag Restoran. Twenty years ago Lutfi, an accomplished baker of breads and pastries, opened the restaurant on a hill above town and began serving local cuisine, which bears influences from Crete. As I followed him through the upper narrow lanes along which the market spread, vendors with 50-pound sacks of wild greens beckoned. After purchasing yogurt, cheese and square loaves of chickpea-yeasted bread, we stopped at the Cakirs’ butcher, who broke down

two 25-pound lambs.

     At Kaplan Dag I helped prep the sevketi bostan, a spiny thistle I’d become somewhat obsessed with after sightings at every market on my itinerary; it would be boiled, mixed with lamb and enriched with avgolemono, a broth of egg and lemon. At lunch the dish, which highlights the unique flavor of the thistle — it fell somewhere between artichoke and asparagus — complemented cold meze: rice-stuffed squash blossoms; a surprising salad of uncooked nettles mixed with chiles, tomato, whey cheese and dried mint; roasted small onions dressed with olive oil and sprinkled with dried thyme and piney melengec leaves. Tire kofte — minced beef molded to a skewer, grilled and then sautéed with tomatoes, crushed red pepper and plenty of butter —

followed.

     Dessert was milky fresh ricotta-like lor topped with sweet mulberry preserves. If I returned in the summer, Serkan said, I’d find a vendor at the Tuesday market selling cups of snow — supposedly collected from the top of a nearby mountain — drizzled with syrup made from the same fruit. I was already plotting my return.

     IF YOU GO

     Reservations are recommended on weekends and during the high season (May to October).

Dionysos Hotel (Kumlubuk; 90-252-476-7959; dionysoshotel.net). Restaurant reservations required. Daily prix fixe about 90 Turkish lira a person, $49 at 1.80 lira to the dollar, including wine.

Sardunya (Selimiye; 90-252-446-4003). Meal for two, without drinks, about 90 lira.

Yengec (Urla Iskele, Izmir; 90-232-752-1152; yengec-restaurant.com). Meal for two, without drinks, about 95 lira.

Kaplan Dag Restoran (Kaplan Village, Tire; 90-232-512-6652; kaplandag.com). Meal for two, without drinks, about 65 lira.

MORE IN TRAVEL (7 OF 26 ARTICLES)

My friend added some additional clarification:

Tina,  I think that the 3x weekly "farmer's market" here in Marmaris is one of the better features of living here.  The prices are in some cases, so reasonable one wonders how the items even get to the market as the cost of fuel is thru the roof.  There is one market here that on Sundays, is predominately manned by the local farmers that grow their own stuff, tomatoes, cucumbers, et al.  So, the stuff was in the ground just a day or two ago.  My wife just returned from visiting family in Tekirova, Kemer, near to Antalya. The lemons she brought back from the local trees are the size of softballs. There are so many there that many are not picked and just fall to ground.  Meat (Lamb and Cow) is expensive. Ground beef, 20% fat is about $6.50 a pound. Filet Mignon is about twice that. Dry aged Beef ribs are about $15/pound.  Lamb is usually more expensive that beef.  Chicken is reasonable. A whole chicken runs about $1.60/pound from the local stores.  Fish: locally caught fish, maybe 12 inches long, like a white fish, not too oily, runs about 3.70 per pound. Sardines usually cost just under $2 per pound. Large fish, like shark, swordfish, tuna, groupers and the like tend to run about $13 pound. Good size shrimp and calamari is about the same.  Bread: Fresh baked 3-4 times a day. The government subsidized white bread costs about 69¢ per pound. All other varieties, rye, wheat, russian, etc about twice that and are baked usually mid-morning to id afternoon.  Hope this adds some clarity to the article. Lee