Makin' Mantı

This weekend I learned how to make one of my favorite Turkish foods, mantı. (OK, technically it's my favorite "Central Asian" food, but I'll just adopt the Turkish norm of referring to its Turkish origins.) The name is often translated as "Turkish ravioli" in English menus, a name which gives a sense of the dish but does not do justice to the particular deliciousness of these tiny meat-filled dumplings.

So that you may learn, and I may not forget, here is the nub and gist of mantı preparation. First off, the dough consists of flour, eggs, and salt water. How much? Oh, enough. Of course these things are only "measured" by the watchful eye of the senior Turkish housewife present, in this case, my coworker's mother. The dough is kneaded and kneaded and kneaded by rolling your fists on it, kind of like slow-motion punches. Then it is separated into smaller chunks, in our case, four. Then more kneading and more flour to keep it from sticking. There is a special low, round, wooden table and long, thin rolling pin used for mantı, gözleme, börek; basically anything that involves rolling out dough. I would give the Turkish names for the table and rolling pin here but a) I forgot them and b) they differ by region.

The smaller hunks of dough are rolled first in the normal fashion of stroking the pin across the dough's surface. After an appropriately thin dough is achieved the whole thing is rolled around the thin rolling pin and pulled outwards by the motion of your hands from the middle to the outside. (That sounds a lot more complicated then it is, and if I had a picture of myself engaged in this pursuit, it would be much clearer.) In any case you stretch and stretch the dough until it is almost as big as the table, and then you do it a few more times, just in case. Then the dough is cut into the tiny squares you see below and filled with a finely chopped mixture of ground beef, onion, parsley, salt, and "spices", which I believe referred to red pepper in this case. You poke a little morsel of the meat mixture onto each square, and then fold the corners together and then press them into the middle to form a little pocket*. This part takes the longest- filling and folding each of the tiny squares took about 3 hours, with four tireless women working together.



After this, the many many finished products are at long last boiled for about 10 minutes, their size making it extremely easy to cook them quickly. Traditionally there are several sauces for them, and sometimes they are also used as dumplings in soup. In our case we put some lightly spiced tomato paste (salça) in butter and added a small amount of this to salted and slightly watered-down yogurt (ayran) by way of sauce. I have also eaten them with nothing but an entirely ill-advised amount of butter and walnuts on top.

(Aside: this picture was taken from Turkish wikipedia, credited to OsManduRdu, but it is almost identical to the scene in my Turkish coworker's kitchen. The spice in the jar is sumac, to be spooned on later if desired.)

A total of about 5 hours of work makes them taste at LEAST five times as good as in any restaurant. When I first began eating I inhaled those little yogurt-covered meat-packets as though I hadn't eaten for days (and by virtue of my being in Turkey we all know that is utterly impossible), and when I finished my last bite it slowly dawned on me that in polite circles the rapidity of my consumption might have been considered a bit rude. But as I looked up from my plate for the first time since the first taste hit my eager taste buds, I saw that I was behind in finishing by two other girls, and they immediately begged me to let them fill my plate anew, a request which I quickly and grateful obliged.

Afiyet olsun!



*In other words, you reunite the meat, which I'll call Numa, with the mantı's core. Sorry, that joke is for the benefit of only one reader of this blog.

Salt versus Skulls

For a trip that lasted two weeks, it sure was a whirlwind. There were two utterly indescribable highlights from both cities I visited...which I will, of course, endeavor to describe below. I couldn't resist trying to compare them, but in the end both teams played hard, and in a battle no one should win, who can win? I should also mention that both of the highlights were not in their respective cities proper, but short trips outside the environs. Without further ado:

PRAGUE HIGHLIGHT: THE SEDLEC OSSUARY
The Sedlec Ossuary is actually in the former second-largest town in Czech[Republic]oslovakia, Kutna Hora. Kutna Hora is beautiful in its own Bohemian way...but I didn't go there to enjoy the town. Make no bones about it, I was headed to the hippest joint in the place: a chapel decorated with the remains of an estimated 40,000 plague victims. Needless to say, my jaw dropped as I toured the inner radius of the chapel, and I got a bit of playful ribbing from my friend about how many pictures I took. The story of the place is that "Henry", the abbot of the Cistercian Monastery in Sedlec, went to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage and brought back some official Holy Land soil, and so the chapel cemetery became quite the desirable place to send the dead. However, when the plague struck the sheer number of bodies got a bit overwhelming, and in 1870 to "get the bones in order" an intrepid carpenter , František Rint, decided, in keeping with the chapel's “Baroque” fashion, to decorate the church with the bones of the dead. I don't think I can do this place much more justice in words, so please just admire these photos. The whole place is morbidly breathtaking and totally enthralling, and the beauty of something like a garland of human skulls makes it very difficult to wrap one's mind around the fact that they are actual human remains, which has the surprising effect of making the chapel more of an aesthetic experience than a spiritual one. At least, that's how it was for me. I also could hear John Cleese yelling “LOOK AT THE BONES!” in my head for much of the time, which was rather irreverent, but seriously--just look at them.






KRAKOW HIGHLIGHT: WIELICZKA SALT MINE
Why was the salt mine so awesome? Well, for one thing, it was the first (and likely the only) tour I've ever been on where I've been invited to lick the walls (whether this was facetious or not is unclear due to my guide's completely emotionless delivery of his well-rehearsed English patter about the mine that did not change in tone for the two hour duration of the tour). Secondly, while the mine itself is an unbelievable testament to the human addiction to salt, and is an unfathomable labyrinth of complex tunnels, carvings, chapels, salty lakes, and the like, it also boasts not one, but TWO ridiculous music-and-light shows on the tourist route. You know, to make it interesting. Out of the many tours you could get carted around on in Krakow, it's hard to dwarf how much this one rocks. The mine is definitely a good pick and I'd recommend you ax questions of your guide in order to get all the information, lest you be shafted. You'll learn that the mine also has a bit of meta-tourism going for it, because inside it has carved tributes to the famous tourists that have visited (Copernicus, Goethe, Chopin, Pope John Paul II, and more!) in addition to antiquated and currently unused tourist attractions like a subterranean ferry across one of the salty lakes. Sodium, baby! (Unfortunately due to being underground I have few to no good pictures. The final picture, of the salt-crystal chandelier, is from Wikipedia, taken by Andrzej Barabasz.)



In retrospect, the obvious answer to the question of which is better is simply...both. Who will carve a bone chapel inside the salt mine, though?