The Turkish Cookbook: Regional Recipes and Stories

Product Information

About the Author:The author of this cookbook is John Gregory-Smith, who is a talented cook, recipe developer, and travel writer. He also works as an online editor for magazines eat.travel.live and Tesco Real Food and a journalist for Grazia online. This volume also includes an introduction showcasing the culinary cultural history of the country, insightful headnotes, stunning photography of finished dishes and atmospheric images evoking the beauty and diversity of the Turkish landscape, environment, markets, and people. The instructions for the recipes were easy to follow and not too complex. All in all they turned out very well.. Despite not knowing how the food should taste (which makes it harder to adjust at the end) all recipes turned out delicious. The tomato sauce with the okra recipe was especially good. Her passion for Turkish food and exploring its diverse culinary landscape shines through in her cookbook as she shares her personal stories of traveling throughout Turkey and learning from local cooks. Daĝdeviren investigates the extensive world of Turkish food with 500 recipes featured in a book that is designed to be a core title: encyclopedic and authoritative."― Library Journal

From a country rich in culinary traditions comes an exhaustively researched, written and photographed book."― The Sunday Times Turkey has made an enduring contribution to the world's cuisine with its diverse and important gastronomic history and classic-simple yet rich in flavors - cuisine. Turkish cuisine is a mosaic, a colorful cuisine enriched by the recipes and techniques of many ancient cultures-Phoenician, Hittite, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Persian, Chinese, and Greek - and the creativity of the cooks and the geography of the regions they lived in. Moreover, this volume also includes an introduction showcasing the country’s culinary history exemplified by stunning photography of finished dishes and atmospheric images that light up the beauty and diversity of the Turkish landscape, environment, markets, and people. The definitive cookbook of hearty, healthy Turkish cuisine... Thoroughly showcases the diversity of Turkish food."― Edible Hawaiian Islands Chef Musa Dagdeviren [has] travelled throughout Turkey to find its best regional specialties and food traditions."― The Scotsman

Publishers Text

Musa Dağdeviren is chef-owner of Ciya Sofra. He was born in Nizip, Gaziantep in 1960 and started working in his uncle's bakery when he was 5 years old, until 1977, when he moved to Istanbul and started to work with his uncle as a cook, responsible for the wood burning oven. He learned to make kebabs and appetizers in the Istanbul and Gaziantep styles and developed his experiences on kebab and pide. After more apprenticeship and his military service, he returned to Istanbul and worked as the master cook of kebab and appetizers in a few restaurants, and also worked in a bakery. In 1987 he opened Ciya/Kebap-Lahmacun, and in 1990, Zeynep Caliskan, who would later become his wife, joined the Ciya family. Musa’s experiences and his further research enriched the kebab menu containing a list of 100 items. He also created the first vegetarian lahmacun and kebab. In 1998 he opened Ciya Sofra, where he created a unique menu with the local food, desserts, and drinks of a vast area. In 2001 he started another kebab restaurant, Ciya Kebap II. In 2005 Musa and Zeynep established Çiya Publishing Company and started to publish a semi-academic quarterly magazine called Food and Culture. They have now published five books and three translated books. In 2018, Netflix’s Emmy Award-winning program Chef’s Table featured Musa in Season 5. His first cookbook in English, The Turkish Cookbook, contains 550 recipes and was published by Phaidon in April 2019. Musa and Zeynep established the Çiya Foundation 10 years ago; it produces research and projects in relation to food and drinks culture. Healthful and tantalizing, simple and delicious, Turkish cuisine is well on its way to becoming the next big trend in cooking as more and more attention is being paid to it as the original Mediterranean diet In the 80’s he opened up his first own restaurant, Çiya. This restaurant grew over time, opening up new concepts in the same street and owning their own farm for their produce. He has not limited himself to one type of Turkish cuisine. Instead, he strongly believes that all the different heritages, Azeri, Georgian, Turkish, Aarabic, Armenian, etc. should all be served together. Food is what should bring people together, not push them apart. Chef’s table Based on the memoir Anatolian Days and Nights as the pioneer, Tree of Life introduced more than 100 accessible recipes inspired by Turkish food traditions found in the authors’ travels. All these adaptations of authentic dishes draw on readily available ingredients while featuring traditional techniques.

Becoming friends after finding the same common in love for Turkish food, the two authors had been accompanied together in a cultural adventure tour of Turkey that spanned ten years. Returning from this journey, they decided to call upon Anatolia’s flavors not just by cooking meals every day for friends and families but incorporating in writing a recipe book.

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This cookbook covers a wealth of regional and ethnic Turkish food that it's quite difficult to find recipes for elsewhere (or eat anywhere but in less-traveled parts of Turkey or in the author's Istanbul restaurant), but unfortunately it has a number of translation and editing issues -- some ingredients are mistranslated or translated strangely (e.g. 'sour cherries' for the fruit of the cherry laurel, or 'poppy seeds' for white/yellow poppy seeds, both of which are critical to the dish and hard to find in the west, though substitutable), ingredients are sometimes unspecified (e.g. '200g lamb' with no specification of cut or treatment), or specified inconsistently (e.g. "peppers", "chillies", "chiles", "sweet chiles", "hot chiles", and "hot peppers" all used inconsistently, leading to some confusion about sweet or hot peppers for a dish); there are also a few typo errors (e.g. swapping tomato and pepper pastes). If you read Turkish & can compare recipes, this is fine; otherwise be wary! Written by a journalist and photographer couple who have spent almost twenty years discovering the country’s very best dishes, Istanbul and Beyond is the most extensive and lushly photographed Turkish cookbook. Musa Dağdeviren himself has grown up and lived in Turkey for his whole life. His hometown Nizip lies in the south of Turkey, not too far from Syria. Growing up as the youngest sibling in the family, he used to spend a lot of time with his mother. Through her, he learned about their culture and the foods that go with it. In Turkish cooking, there are no unusual ingredients. You can go into any supermarket in this country and find what you need to make very easy Turkish dishes."