Sweets | Page 10 of 11
Dondurma: Traditional Turkish Ice Cream
Dondurma is a traditional Turkish ice cream known for its extraordinarily dense and chewy consistency. It resists melting even in the hot summer sun. It owes its unique properties primarily to salep from wild orchids and a resin called mastic. Thanks to them, the dessert's structure resembles chilled dough rather than cream. Street vendors therefore perform a renowned show with it and stretch it with long metal rods. They often tease customers and don't just give them the cone.
Halka Tatlısı: Round Fried Dessert
Halka tatlısı is a Turkish street dessert in the shape of a fried, ridged ring soaked in sugar syrup. It belongs to the most widespread and affordable sweets in the streets of Istanbul. The basis of the dish is a specific choux pastry extruded directly into hot oil. The hot fried pieces are immediately tossed into cold syrup. Thanks to the thermal shock, the surface remains crispy, but the porous inside soaks up the liquid like a sponge. Deep grooves also help trap even more sweet juice.
Pişmaniye: Turkish Cotton Candy
Pişmaniye is traditional Turkish cotton candy. Unlike ordinary cotton candy, it contains roasted flour and butter. This gives it a nutty aroma and fibrous texture. Its traditional preparation requires great physical strength and coordination. Pişmaniye is a popular Turkish souvenir.
Papanași: A Romanian Dessert of Curd Cheese, Sour Cream and Jam
Papanași are fried doughnuts made of curd cheese dough, a ring with a little ball on top drowned in sour cream and jam - the only Romanian dessert in the ranking of the hundred best in the world. I'll explain why they aren't doughnuts, what they share with the curd dumplings from a Czech school canteen and what they tasted like at Restaurant Rustic in Iași.
Cozonac: Romania's Sweet Holiday Bread
Cozonac is a Romanian festive bread made from a rich yeast dough, with a filling of walnuts, cocoa, poppy seeds or rahat rolled into a spiral and baked in a loaf pan. It goes on the table at Christmas and at Easter, and it belongs to a family that also includes Bulgarian kozunak, Greek tsoureki and Italian panettone. You can tell a good cozonac by the way it tears along the grain, into long strips.
Colivă: The Funeral Wheat Romanians Hand Out for the Soul of the Dead
Colivă is sweet boiled wheat with walnuts, sugar and cinnamon, shaped into a mound and decorated with a cross of cocoa. In Romania it isn't cooked for lunch but for funerals and memorial services, after which it is handed out outside the church as alms for the soul of the dead. The custom is shared by the whole Orthodox world from Greece to Serbia, and the name comes from a small Greek coin.
Blueberry Dumplings from Kohútka
Some guests ring Kohútka, the ridge of the Javorníky mountains above my home village, to ask whether blueberry dumplings are on the menu that day. Yeast dough, buried under poppy seeds and sugar, drizzled with butter, made to the recipe of an eighty-four-year-old grandmother who still helps out in the kitchen. More than a thousand of them go out in a single weekend - and one giant portion will happily feed two.
Tigelada: A Portuguese Dessert from the Oven
In the 16th century a Portuguese infanta carried the recipe for tigelada to Italy as part of her dowry; today this baked dessert of eggs, milk and sugar also sits in the chillers of Portuguese supermarkets. Its home is central Portugal, where two official recipes live side by side - one with sugar, the other with honey and goat's milk - and every August it gets a festival of its own.
Beijinhos de Amor: Sweet Kisses from Lousada
Three whole eggs and fifteen yolks for barely six hundred grams of dough - the recipe alone gives away the convent pedigree of beijinhos de amor. Kisses of love, little egg-yolk cakes in a sugar shell from Lousada in Portugal, keep for months and survive the trip home in a suitcase. Where does the name come from, and why does the best-known maker sit outside the town's own boundary?
Cornetto: The Italian Answer to the Croissant
The cornetto is the Italian counterpart of the croissant: layered leavened dough shaped into a crescent, with eggs and sugar worked in, softer and sweeter than the French original and almost always filled with custard cream, chocolate, marmalade or pistachio cream. In northern Italy it's a brioche, on a shop shelf a croissant, at the counter a cornetto. You eat it in the morning with a cappuccino, and its family tree goes back to medieval Vienna, not to Paris.