Cooking Holiday
Shaded beneath vines heavy with grape, an electric group of four kids (Olivia, Charlie, Fred and Eva) and two mums (Sasha Devereux and Laila Court) enjoy pre-lesson drinks on a raised Ottoman seating space at Guru’s place. This roadside restaurant specialising in mantı, kuzu incik (lamb shank), and finger-licking yogurtlu köfte doesn’t just double as a cooking school. It’s the first ‘cooking holiday’ school cum retreat of its kind in this part of Turkey. And the man behind it is Hüseyin Kayır. Hüseyin is a professional chef with an insatiable passion for gastronomy, and this restaurant has been in his family for over 22 years.
In recent years, Guru’s classes have become just as popular with hard core foodies as they are with tourists with a newfound interest in Turkey´s culinary delights and an inclination to dabble. Neither is it rare for a group to consist mostly of children, as it does today. Sasha and Laila have been to Kalkan over four times. Laila has been visiting since she was 18, and speaks Turkish pretty well. Yet for both, today´s experience has exposed them to a lot of firsts.
´Hüseyin took us to buy our ingredients from local shops and charcuteries,´ says Sasha ´and showed us how to select vegetables. It was good to learn about places where you can get fresh produce, as opposed to buying at supermarket chains.´ Hüseyin is a firm believer in using ingredients sourced as locally as possible. For example, the olive oil he uses is made by his grandfather, from their own olive trees. Local doesn’t just mean fresh or organic with minimal additives and pesticides guaranteed. It also means supporting small local business which offer better quality and more variety in any one kind of product, for the simple reason that they only specialize in any one kind of product.
´Thanks to large supermarkets, such businesses would easily go out of business without our support,´ says Hüseyin. And of course, thanks to supermarkets our traditional food culture is also dying a slow but gradual death. ‘The average Turk today isn´t aware that there are over 432 Different varieties of traditional cheese in Turkey.’ Hüseyin boasts. The kids at his class do though. They yell out the figure in unison when he tests them on the things they´ve learnt during the morning´s grocery shopping. ´The cheese isles of supermakets stock foreign imports of Edam and Camembert, but the Turkish varieties tend only to be variations of feta and kasar,´ he adds with visible derision.
On the menu today is Tavuklu börek, a traditional Turkish style pastry dish with a chicken and veg filling. There’s aprons of varying sizes to go around for all, and once we’ve washed our hands, we get stuck into peeling potatoes, grating carrots and generally preparing the filling, which promises to be very rich. Once it’s all in a pan, Hüseyin gets things frying then leaves Laila in charge after the heat’s turned down a bit. It’ll be time to get wrapping soon, so the kids start readying the counters for the sheets of pastry, and they get a big kick out of it to boot. Not surprisingly since the exercise involves lots of oil, many greasy little hands, and us overseeing the work with side-line commentary like ‘you missed a spot.’ Charlie in particular does an excellent job of it, and we welcome the distraction from those delicious aromas that have started to get our stomachs churning in anticipation. ‘Are you fasting?’ Fred asks, because he knows it’s Ramadan, and there’s curiosity mixed with a little concern in his face. Is it that obvious? Tight jawed we nod and smile broadly to indicate that it’s quite alright. He mulls this information over, thoughtfully.
Cooking in the Mediterranean isn’t just about perfecting a culinary art-form. It’s about passion and joviality. It’s about bonding and sharing. And it’s about putting love in the food –something you’re not going to get at Michelin starred restaurants, no matter how mind blowing the food is. Hüseyin shares our sentiment, and stresses that this is what he’s really out to instil in his students. Judging by the excited slapping of greasy palms on his counters, it’s working.
