Oh jayzus… food of the ancient Turkish gods, those were. I just ate, but I’m drooling at the thought of 'em anyway. Absolute hands-down favorite.
pulykamell is correct in her description of çiğ köfte. The actual amount of raw meat is quite low in proportion to the bulgur and the spices, in theory, act in much the same way as citric acid does in the preparation of ceviche. But every time I went grocery shopping at the department store just off campus (Real, anyone?) I’d grab a couple of wraps and chow on them before catching a taxi home. Spicy goodness!
I lived in Turkey, too. I know how Rakı is pronounced. The “oo” is the best I can explain it to English-speakers.
Agent Foxtrot tried it straight in a bar, which our Turkish friends thought was crazy. Rakı is the only drink I’ve ever seen that starts off clear, and turns cloudy when you add water to it.
There’s a few that do it. The effect is called “louching” and is present in many anise-based drinks like ouzo and Pernod/pastis. (edit: oh, and absinthe, too.)
I love all these exotic food threads but this one just doesn’t do it for me. Most of the food is just plain mediocre.
My favorite things from Turkish cuisine would have to be the local seafood, various dips, and their ice cream . You obviously can’t get any of their local seafood here. In fact, it’s getting more and more difficult to get it over there due to overfishing. From what I remember in the month I spent in Istanbul, there was a fast foodish type sandwich made of mussels that was available just about everywhere. The two fish I liked the most were an orange fish and one that resembled a turbot/flounder/halibut. It even had buttons. Both were absolutely delicious. Had to be some of the best fish I’ve ever eaten but they seemed expensive, even for us tourists. The last seafood dish I’ll mention was a shrimp dish served sizzling with melted cheese and a few other ingredients that I can’t recall.
Besides the chick pea based hummus, they also have dips based off of eggplants and peppers (which is called caviar by some of the people in my family). Speaking of which, actual caviar is readily available and oh so yummy.
The ice cream was served all over the city in carts and shops too. Flavors included pistachio, lemon, sour cherry, chocolate and a few others you don’t usually see in your local supermarket. After a quick Google search, it seems like they called it “dondurma” but most pages mention it being picked up and played around with even though I didn’t see that once.
I guess there’s one more thing I should add. I’m Armenian and, like previously mentioned, the foods from that region are pretty much all the same. So maybe I’m just bored of the every day home cooking but all the other foods kind of suck. When did ground beef and rice wrapped in various leaves become good?
As for rakı: I don’t know how similar arrack is (I’m guessing they’re pretty much the same thing) but it’s drunk the same way - cut with water and ice so it louches. (Which reminds me, I gotta start looking up the good absinthe when I get back to Sweden.)
ETA: I didn’t like Turkish ice cream all that much - the texture was more gummy than creamy. I missed the hell out of Ben & Jerry’s while I was there.
Da. Actually, Bulgarian has TONS of Turkish borrow words. Huge amounts. I didn’t realize exactly how many until I went to Turkey and was shocked by the amount of words I recognized on signs. A friend of mine is Albanian and we often play a game of figuring out what words are the same in Bulgarian and Albanian (which are unrelated other than all of the Turkish borrow words). So far we’ve discovered quite a few.
The “oo” is very similar to the Turkish dotless i if you think of the “oo” in “good” or “book” rather than in, say, “moose”, which is quite a different sound.