rolling rolling rolling.

Gozleme [geuzlehmay]--often incorrectly described as "the Turkish crepe"; not at all crepe-like, more like a quesadilla. but not.

Making good gozleme is hard. The filling isn't the problem, it's the dough. It's not even the dough. It's rolling the dough. Dough for a good gozleme is rolled to a thickness of 1-5 mm. Not an easy task, as those of you who have tried rolling a pie crust to 1/8-inch thickness may know.

Now, the woman who cleans Candas's grandparents' apartment, Sati, knows how to roll gozleme pretty darned well. Being the dear soul that she is, Candas finagled a little gozleme rolling party for a few of us who wanted to learn how to make it. So, on Thursday I headed over to Candas's place.

sidenote: I'm kind of stupid. I decided I would walk from Kizilay to Candas' place instead of taking the bus. I'm all about walking, especially if it's a nice day...and Thursday started out being a relatively cool but nice day. But, it was an hour uphill and I had gone for a run in the morning, so I was kind of tired from the get-go. Nonetheless, I was making good time, my map was guiding me perfectly. Then, all of a sudden, I'm lost. And then the black clouds come in, the temperature drops 5-10 degrees, snow is on its way, and I'm about to collapse. Eventually I made it, but there were some moments where I wasn't absolutely positive I wasn't going to die. Funny part was, I was only lost by one block but I went around in circles for at least half-an-hour.

I was the first to get to Candas' house and soon thereafter Michael and Yvonne showed up. Then the important part began.

Yvonne and I took notes on the dough, trying to get ingredient proportions and describe the texture of the dough at different phases. I can understand why no one ever figured out my babaanne's borek recipe. All the "the dough has the feeling between the feel of your cheek and the tip of your nose" stuff is a real pain. But, luckily, this one was a comparatively straightforward recipe. It's a simple dough but different people have different recipes. They all have the same base of flour, salt, and water. Some, like Sati's, also include yeast and/or eggs.

After the dough was made and we let it sit 10 minutes, the rolling began. The key? Flour. Lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of flour.












Sati was a pro--so fast! so agile! so thin was her dough! Then it was our turn.








Uhh, not so easy. The second key, we think, is getting the dough to make the signature Sati snapping sound when you flip the dough open...and none of us really succeeded in producing the sound. But, we all managed to roll it out without any major catastorphes. Of course, when we were done Sati would do a few more rolls to even out and perfect our not-so-perfect work. Yvonne and I were quite nervous when our turns came up, Michael and Candas seemed comparatively unfazed. Overall, we all ended up with the same results.







There were two fillings--peynirli [cheese], kiymali [meat]. Sati filled, folded, and cooked the gozleme to perfection. Then, we consumed. Like beasts. I thought I was gonna explode at the end. The bad part was that another friend, Melinda, was having a dinner party later that night. It took real effort to get myself hungry again, but that was worth it, too.




Now, the day of rolling doesn't just stop there. You'll notice there are, in fact, three "rolling"s in the title. So, on to number two.

Melinda's party was on the same street as Candas', and I was not at all thrilled at the prospect of going all the way home and back again in that cold. So, I went to Michael and Yvonne's for the afternoon.

Yvonne just got back from a nearly month long trip and she had picked up some nice stones. So, she played around with them for awhile and made a nice little bulb garden with the tulip bulbs she picked up in Amsterdam. While she was doing that, I looked up stuff about the bird migration over the Bosphorous--i'm thinking of taking a day trip to Istanbul to check it out.




Eventually, we got bored. And then, we had an idea: TAVLA! [backgammon for all you non-Turks]. But, Yvonne didn't have a board. Luckily, however, we were resourceful. As I said, Yvonne picked up some nice pebbles...by some, I mean tons! So, lo and behold, we manage to put together a pretty great tavla board. But then we didn't have any dice...no problem, Yvonne just drew dots on some of the square pebbles. And voila! The next hour was consumed with dice rolling and tavla playing. It was hard to finally pull ourselves away to go back up the hill. But, we've got the board for another day. Hooray.

Melinda's party was a good time and I had some good archeology/travel conversation with Lee. He and his gal, Heidi, are going to be traveling around Turkey for the month of May to check out a number of Hittite sites. They offered to have me hop on board for some of it, which I might do given that they are going east.

All in all, a long but great day.

BUT WAIT! There's still one "rolling" left.

The next day, still excited by all things rolling, I thought I might try to roll gozleme on my own. I decided to try a different dough recipe that didn't use the eggs and yeast. Best part? I got to break out the rolling stick I bought in Beypazari.


And let me just say: I got the snap! My dough snapped!

Results? Well, you can judge for yourself. Sati's are above and mine are here. I will say that I was pretty proud of myself. Hey, they looked and tasted right! Tack on a little homemade Ayran (yogurt drink) and salad...I had the perfect spring dinner. Mmm...afiyet olsun!