All posts tagged: culture

Turkish pancake

You say Crumpet, I say Akitma! – Holey Pancake Day Out in Canakkale

Published by

One of our family rituals for spring is a visit to MIL’s village to collect some spring food items. The day always starts with the most anticipated breakfast with akitma. It’s meant to be a carb-loading day, which happens only once in a while, so why not just enjoy it? Akitma is a pancake leavened with yeast, which fits somewhere between a pancake, English crumpets and French crepes. The texture and the holey appearance place it very close to English crumpets though. This cross-cultural root of akitma made me look deeper into the history of crumpets, pikelets, pancakes, etc. The fact that akitma is eaten specifically in this Thracian region of Turkey coincides with Bulgarian pancake, ‘katmi‘, though the latter has more eggs. I’m not a food anthropologist but it might be fair to say that akitma is the holy mother of  the later more-refined crumpets in the Victorian era? The more I eat it, the more I appreciate the honeycomb-like holes and spongy texture. Butter, honey, or anything put on it will be trapped in all those tiny …

Turks go to Korea: Cultural and Culinary Shock, Pleasure, and a TurKo Tie

Published by

I’m back from a long and exhausting trip. The 2 weeks of our time in Korea were divided into two; a road trip and a family affair, which I’ll write about in the next post. But first, I’ll share stories from our trip out of Seoul. For those who are not familiar with Asian culture and who visit Korea for the first time, there are two challenges; first, chopsticks, and second, sleeping on the floor. The first wasn’t a big issue since most restaurants had forks available, and as time went by, the Turkish guests got better and better with chopsticks and even got to love them and bought some to use in Turkey, with some thinking that they will probably lose weight by eating chopsticks, hahah. But everyone refusing to sleep on the floor often complicated things when booking an accommodation. Most Koreans sleep on beds nowadays but there are people who still prefer to sleep on a warm floor like my mum, and many hotels have options for a room with a bed or under-floor heating. The fact is that you …