Turkish Cuisine Week: Cooking Workshop at The Food School Bangkok
By Kathleen Pokrud
Turkish cuisine is shaped by more than a thousand years of culture and tradition, social heritage and stories. Every year, its distinctive and diverse flavours are presented to the world during Turkish Cuisine Week, from 21 to 27 May.
An initiative of the First Lady of Türkiye, Emine Erdoğan, Turkish Cuisine Week has as its aim to introduce Türkiye's rich gastronomic culture to a broad audience at home and abroad while highlighting the sustainability and zero waste philosophy of Turkish Cuisine. In its third year, the theme of the recent Turkish Cuisine Week showcased Aegean flavours, a delicious fusion of history, culture and nature. A beautiful landscape of green and blue, Türkiye’s Aegean coast attracts attention with its magnificent scenery and deep-rooted history, as well as its healthy food culture.
In 2010, UNESCO recognized the Mediterranean Diet as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, and these coastal regions are famed for vegetables such as artichokes and zucchini blossoms, as well as local herbs and an abundance of seafood. The Aegean region is also known for its centuries-old olive trees and olive oils, a secret to long life.
Olive gardens stretch like a route from Çanakkale to Muğla, revealing the region's cultural heritage of olive cultivation. In the region, İzmir and Milas stand out two important stops of the ‘The Routes of the Olive Tree’, which is registered by the Council of Europe. Findings in the ancient Klazomenai in Urla, home to Anatolia's oldest olive oil workshop, attest to the 2,600-year-old history of olive processing methods that are still used today.
To commemorate Turkish Cuisine Week, the Embassy of the Republic of Türkiye in Thailand organised a ‘Turkaegean Cooking Class’. In collaboration with “The Food School Bangkok”, Mr Muammer Ayar, the chef of the Turkish Embassy in Bangkok, showed attendees how to make three signature dishes from the Aegean region: ‘mücver’ (zucchini fritters), ‘karides güveç’ (shrimp casserole) and ‘incir uyutması’ (milk and dried fig pudding). Chef Ayar additionally prepared three dishes: ‘tarhana’ (traditional Turkish soup), ‘zeytinyağlı pırasa’ (leeks braised in olive oil) and ‘ıspanaklı börek’ (layered pastry with spinach).
The event successfully presented the Turkaegean cuisine while emphasizing one of the most beautiful features of Turkish gastronomic heritage: cooking and enjoying food together…
