Saturday, June 18, 2016

Cheese & Football Feast day 8: Turkey

So we are more than a week into the cheese and football feast of the Euro2016 tournament and I think I am getting a little punch drunk on cheese as I managed to miss report in my blogpost the result of Thursday's game of Germany vs Poland, but did get that corrected pretty quickly to a draw.  Spain, however, beat Turkey 3 goals to nil, and Turkey never looked like winning that one. For the cheese feast I chose a Turkish feta and spinach filled pide and Turkish Efes beer.
This is another bread based dish in my cheese feast series and it that can be filled a number of ways, but this one has Feta cheese, onions, red peppers, hot red pepper paste, and lots of spinach. The spinach baked up quite dark in the hot oven so it does look rather more scorched than it actually was.
The recipe comes from a wonderful blog on Turkish food named Ozlem's Turkish Table. There are loads of good recipes there and information about her cookery classes and culinary tours in Turkey.

I bought my feta cheese and hot red pepper paste from a uk online Turkish foods supplier called bakkalim. I know you can get feta in local shops but I fell in love with the tin:
It looks very authentic but 'other half' noticed it was made in the Netherlands and Gazi appears to be a German company but they  sponsor a lot of football so there is still a connection.

The pepper paste was quite hot but you can get a mild version.
The breads looked a little more colourful before baking:
The base is pinched up or crimped around the edges to form a lip. I tried my 'Cornish Pastie' style crimp.
The Turkish beer was Efes, may not be one of Turkey's best, it was ok, 'nothing thrilling' as my mother in law would saw.
Next up is a cheese dip from from Hungary and as I could not find a Hungarian beer we are going to have a Hungarian white wine.

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