+ 7 - 6 | § ¶Meeting the Baklava King in Eskişehir

At one point in Turkey it needed to be done. Learn to make Baklava the real way. And who better to ask but the Baklava king himself: M Enver Goker.

The Baklava originates from eastern Turkey in a town called Gazionkep...going back some 900 years.

There are the sweet Baklava and the dry Baklava which are simply filled with nuts and pistachios. The preferred are the sweet Baklava because they are sweet.

The Baklava king works in Eskişehir's Baklava Centre. Today he produces 40 trays per day with his own hands. Thats roughly 4000 Baklavas per day. His experience is unrivalled, he has produced Baklava across the world, from Turkey to the USA, to Germany and Switzerland, and back to Turkey again.

On the 19th january, the Baklava king invited me to his workshop and agreed to let us in upon the family secrets that have been with the Gokers for generations.

This is an insider's recipe from the Baklava king's grand-ma. So respect goes out to this unique recipe, to the Baklava king and to his grand-ma, who sadly is no longer with us today.

+ 7 - 2 | § ¶Lentil Soup from Istanbul

The cold weather in Istanbul got us addicted to this local delicacy.

In most restaurants and cafes in Istanbul you can always find a huge pan-ful of lentil soup, or lentil "corba", waiting for people coming in from the cold.

In the first days we would have one bowl of the stuff per meal. In our last days in Istanbul, we were up to four bowls per day!

We created this "Food & Drink" section of the site as we thought you would be interested by a few recipes one comes across when travelling by bicycle.  And we'd love to share them with you! The sad thing is we won't be cooking some of these dishes when camping, as a number of ingredients cooking time will be needed...Ooooh for a kitchen of our own!!

We will though, be taking special care at understanding the local ingredients, and getting a feel for the cooking techniques people use as we progress. We'll then update the "Food & Drink" section with cooking  ideas from the countries we visit. Hopefully, the time we get back, we will have gathered together,  a sample of cooking culture from each country, that we can all spend the rest of our lives cooking to perfection!

If you ever try out a food or drink recipe, don't forget to drop a comment the next morning on how it went, and how you might go about fine tuning it!

Lentil soup with a zest of lemon, Istanbul style, here's how to go about it!

+ 6 - 6 | § ¶Il Picolit di Marco Sara

When we arrived in Udine, we could not have predicted that one of the teachers, Sandra, was going to invite us to stay at her home, in the wine town of Savorgagno del Torre, where she lives with Marco Sara.

Archives