I have an upcoming vacation that will take me to Turkey and Greece. Any odd kinds of foods that I should look for that I’m not going to get in the States. For example, these are some of the examples I’d look for in other countries: Norway, Lutefisk; Iceland, Hakarl; UK, Haggis; Indonesia, Durian. So, odd is good; a challenge is better.
I’m a vegetarian, so I’ve never had it, but look out for shkembe, a tripe soup that’s eaten everywhere in the Balkans. (I’ve never been to Greece, but I strongly suspect they have it there - I know people eat it from Turkey to Albania.) Honestly, I’ve heard it’s disgusting, but it’s local flavor and all. Supposedly, it has the power to cure hangovers.
Less weird: my favorite cookies in the world are Turkish! They’re called Tutku and they come in a red package. Picture so you know what to look for. Nomnomnom.
All the foodies are in Cafe Society, so let’s go there.
samclem, Moderator, IMHO
Turkey has great mezze, lots of little salads, hummus, etc. with bread. It’s great on a hot day with Efes (a national Turkish beer). Turkey also has great sweets, baklava and Turkish Delight (not a fan, personaly) to name a few. Greece has a lot of great seafood, including octopus prepared in lots of different ways. I’ve had really nice octopus salad in Greece.
mussels saganaki in the greek isles are great…
Kalymnos has some good local honey that goes great with their yoghurt
Santorini actually has a bunch of really little cvepe shops (clearly not greek, but whatever)
and dolmades, stuffed peppers or tomatoes are always good. Greek food never disappoints IMO
In Turkey, I ate a ton of kabbab, but I actually thought it was better in England… but I had some good kafte (little meatballs) and a great fig desert that I can’t remember the name of
oh yes, cheese pies - mmm, cheese pies - look for them, well, everywhere
ETA: head to Bretos in Athens for some good adult beverages… also, there’s a gelato place not too far from Bretos if I remember right (it’s been about 2 years) that is out of this world
Retsina - white wine mixed with pine resin. An aquired taste but good when you’ve aquired it 
There’s the moussaka, which exists in the USA but let’s just say I reckon I’d rather have a Philly steak in Philly than in Barcelona, and calamari. If you’ve had calamares a la romana in Spain, calamari is the same thing, squid rings; I’ve never seen those in the USA.
Halloumi - a Greek/Turkish sheep’s milk cheese - is delicious, I absolutely love it! Best served sliced, marinaded and then grilled to perfection.
The octopus will be very good.
Also the Turkish minced lamb kebabs (or any of their kebabs really) served in yoghurt sauce are always awesome.
It’s called patsas in Greek. Tripe soup as a hangover cure is common throughout many cultures. In Mexico, it’s menudo. In Puerto Rico and some of the surrounding islands, mondongo. In Poland, flaki, etc. It’s kind of interesting how cross-cultural tripe-soup-as-hangover-cure is.
Personally, I think it’s delicious. My favorite is the Mexican version as menudo. But it does have a little bit of farmhouse funk to it (some versions much less than others–it depends on how much you preboil the tripe and dump the cooking liquid), and the texture could get some getting used to. But it’s worth a try. My brother, who doesn’t like a lot of traditional Polish cooking and tends to stay away from offal, loves Polish flaki.
Turkey ideas:
Drinks – Ayran (a slightly salty yoghurt-based drink that is extremely cheap) and Raki (some sort of alcoholic something or other). I wasn’t brave enough to try either of these, but my boyfriend tried ayran and said it “wasn’t the worst thing ever”. Of course apple tea – this stuff is amazing. And if you can find someone offering kuş burnu (bird’s nostril tea) it’s awesome too. Both are warm drinks with strong fruity flavours, apple tea being obviously appley and the “bird’s nostril” tea is rosehip or something. I promise it is not actually the nose of a bird! Efes seems to be the only beer you can get in most of Turkey, there is also Troia beer but it was pretty hard to find in most of the places I visited. My beer-snob friend says Efes was “adequate” but he hated drinking the same beer every day. And of course there is something special about Turkish coffee, but if you find regular coffee too intense or bitter then Turkish coffee is not for you. It comes in a shotglass-sized portion and is kind of like the liquid mercury version of coffee.
Dessert – Kahramanmaraş style ice-cream (often abbreviated to “Maraş dondurma” or “K. Maraş”) is unique and wonderful. It’s made with a special kind of starch in it that gives it a chewy texture and it tends to have very intense flavour. But it is still basically ice cream, if you want something really exotic in Turkey try kunefe, a dessert made from savory cheese and honey syrup. I hated it, but it’s apparently a local favourite. I didn’t encounter it until I got fairly far east of Ankara though. For something a little less exotic but still out-of-the-ordinary I’d suggest Turkish delight - it’s a kind of gelatinous textured dessert and is traditionally rose-flavoured, although if you go to the Spice Bazaar in Istanbul you’ll find a zillion different flavours from vanilla to chocolate to pistachio and various fruits as well. I don’t care for it personally unless it’s vanilla but you can try before you buy so give it a go
Foods – Turkish style pizza (pide or lahmacun) is pretty awesome. I would strongly recommend a sausage (sosij) pide with or without egg, and to liberally sprinkle it with the hot pepper flakes. So good! Turkish pizza uses a flatbread as a base and very minimal topping application. Pides are oblong/rectangular with a folded-over edge so it’s like a very flat boat. Lahmacun are flat and round, more like what we think of as a “thin crust pizza”, but are typically restricted to having minced lamb and veggies on top, not a lot of options for customization. Işkender kebabs are also awesome (shaved roasted lamb or beef in tomato sauce served over bread cubes with sliced raw spicy peppers and lovely thick yoghurt on the side). I also enjoyed the street-food phenomenon of the chicken kebab wrap (tavuk doner durum) which was just marinated, roasted, shaved chicken with lettuce and tomato and sauce (mayo, ketchup, etc.). In some parts of Turkey this will get you a wrap with shaved chicken, chopped gherkin pickles, and LOTS of mayo, with fries mixed in.
ETA: Avoid fries in Turkey at all costs. Honestly, they have no idea what they’re doing. Not a single fry that I tried in the whole country was good. (Granted I didn’t go to McDonald’s, theirs might be okay, but who goes to McD’s when there’s so much delicious food all around?!)
Kyla, I’m with you on the Tutku! So good! Especially if you leave them in the car in the afternoon, so when you come back the filling inside is super gooey and smooth … mmmm.
Tons of places in Turkey (we stayed a month in Istambul and would walk around the sea regularly) have this fried mussel sandwhich that is just so damn amazing. Sour cherries in Turkey are called vişne, are good in jams and ice cream. Ice cream is called dondurma. The pistachio is flavor is good too.
For seafood, there are two types of fish that were just amazing. One was an reddish or orangish type fish, Red Mullet (some website said it’s called “tekir” but I remembe it as “barbunya”) is what it’s called I think. Definitely try that one. The other one, which is probably the best tasting fish I’ve ever tried, is some sort of turbot (I think they call it “kalkan”). Some restaurants in the bazaar have waiters that practically fight each other for you to eat at their table. They’re the guys constantly yelling at you! Anyway, you meat up with one of them, walk them over to the fish market, pick out your fish, then they take you back, seat you, and prepare your food. It’s a fun experience and the fresh never frozen fish is amazing.
Ayran is popular in Bulgaria (where there is a very strong Turkish cultural influence), too, and I shied away from it the whole time I lived there. It just looks so…nasty.
Is there boza in Turkey, too? Fermented wheat…drink stuff? Blech.
I did have rakı in Turkey, though. It was okay. Anise-flavored.
Yeah I definitely didn’t like the looks of the ayran my boyfriend tried, and he did put it off until the very last day we were in Turkey, but he felt obligated! It didn’t smell that great at all. I dunno, something about “salt” and “drink” doesn’t sit quite right with me…
I couldn’t tell you about the boza - I don’t recall having seen anything like that on any menus, but we were there during Ramadan so for the first 17 days of our trip we were avoiding alcoholic drinks so as not to be … I dunno, conspicuous? Disrespectful? It just seemed awkward to order it. I stuck to water and cherry juice (to which I developed an unhealthy addiction, unfortunately it is unavailable in my part of Australia sigh).
It sounds very much like a salted lassi or chaas to me, which you can get at some Pakistani or Western Indian places. I’ve seen it at a number of Indian weddings here in the Chicago area, where the Indians tend to be from Gujarat or Punjab. It’s quite refreshing on a hot summer day, when you need a little salt to replenish your electrolytes. But I could understand why some may find it strange.
Well, boza has an extremely low alcohol content. People drink it in the morning, and it’s common for children to drink it. You couldn’t get drunk off of it. It is, apparently, available in Turkey, btw.
I love the vishna (sour cherry) juice, too! Are there really no stores with Eastern European imports anywhere near you? There are a couple here in my small city - one with more Polish-y type stuff, and one with more Russian-y type stuff. Both of them carry vishna products that are hard to get in the US. I have some vishna jam and I’ve bought vishna juice as well.
In Turkey I strongly recommend eating in the cafeteria-type places as opposed to proper restaurants. They commonly have 4-6 different dishes to choose from, and they are almost always delicious. The places might not be particularly nice or stylish, but they are both cheaper and much better than a-la carte in “real” restaurants, in my opinion.
Börek is a great snack and can be bought from börek shops or street vendors all over the place.
Fresh pistachios can be found everywhere in the south-eastern parts of Turkey. They aren’t really that “odd” in the OP’s sense of the word, but I would at least lable them “unusual”.
Oh, while in Turkey, be sure to find yourself some manti, these delicious Turkish dumplings, usually smaller than tortellini, that are often filled with minced lamb/beef/quail/etc, and served with a garlicky yogurt sauce along with a buttery red-pepper sauce.
I think these places are called “lokantas” and I agree, they are awesome. They usually have the ability to make pides/pizzas as well as a few hot dishes in a hot-food tray that are served with rice or alone, and some cold dishes as sides (like stuffed peppers, dolmades, bean salads, etc.).
Another thing that seems to be a popular Turkish snack/breakfast is the simit. Bagel-shaped sesame-seed-coated breads served with jam or yoghurt or toasted with cheese. Pretty good for a breakfast on the go, although I wouldn’t pass up a typical Turkish hotel breakfast just to have them.
And yeah Kyla, our local shop used to carry an imported Polish sour cherry juice but they stopped doing that long ago (around the same time they stopped carrying anything else interesting or flavourful sigh), and I haven’t found any other place around. But I’ll have another look keeping the idea of Eastern European specialty shops in mind, there might be a deli in the city or something. Thanks for the suggestion! 
I’said it once, I’ve said it a couple of times. Plaki Gigantes.
I’d like to know the Macedonian Stew that Greek- American Style Chili (aka Cncinatti Chili) is supposedly based upon? It has the classic flavorings/spices of cinnamon, allspice, and perhaps cardamom. Reminds me of moussaka or pastizio meat farce… is that the “stew” they are referring to?