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On (not) baking
It was quite a shock, then, to move into first a Boğaziçi summer dorm and later my Ankara flat to find no oven among the various things that qualified each of these abodes as “furnished.” Half-formed plans to buy a toaster oven fell apart when I walked the aisles of the 5M Migros and saw their prices -- not as expensive as an oven, but not something I was about to pick up on my stipend.
Baking doesn't seem to be done as much in this country. Turkish desserts generally don't require baking: muhallebi requires a stove to heat milk, as does güllaç; aşure isn't baked, neither is künefe. American recipes are certainly difficult to transfer over. While the measurements and oven temperatures need to be converted, this is not too terrible an imposition. The difficulty comes in finding the ingredients. I initially couldn't find brown sugar, as it wasn't stocked at either of my two local grocery stores. I had to make a dedicated trip to a larger, further-away branch to buy brown sugar. Chocolate chips are in theory available here and sold under the term “çikolatalı damla,” but are not actually the chocolate chips used in the States. Vanilla is impossible to find: Before luckily finding a few bottles on a jaunt to Europe, I read up on ways to make one's own vanilla extract, as vanilla sugar doesn't produce the flavor of vanilla extract.
I didn't admit defeat easily. Even after not buying a toaster oven, I still attempted to mix up a batch of cookie dough, salmonella be darned, in a brief flash of longing for a taste of home. I used an old standby of a recipe, one that had never failed me before. I had to throw the dough out. It tasted like butter and plastic. I believe the butter flavor came from the margarine and vanilla sugar, while the plastic was from the chocolate chips I used. The consistency was off. It was a wholly unfortunate batch of cookie dough.
I did once find chocolate-chip cookies in a bakery down the street from my flat. It was Kurban Bayramı, and the bakery was the only store open in my neighborhood when I ventured out to try to find something for dinner. I thought it was my lucky day when I saw the chocolate chips dotting the batch of cookies, artfully presented under the glass display case, and ordered a half dozen to take home. Once I tried them, though, reality intervened: while they looked like honest-to-goodness chocolate chip cookies, they tasted like any dry, Turkish kurabiye. It was a bit of a letdown.
Speaking with other expat friends of mine, I heard of similar attempts. One friend of mine reported mixing up a cookie dough-like concoction and cooking it in her frying pan. Another tried to make chocolate-chip cookies with children of a friend, to share an American tradition with them -- they tried the flat, vanilla-sugar-flavored cookies and announced that they didn't think much of these “cookies” she'd been talking up. A third friend mixed up cake batter with Turkish relatives, only to be somewhat perplexed when her relatives brought out a cake pan specifically formulated for stovetop cake baking (like a Bundt pan, it was ring-shaped to allow for a more even heat distribution over the gas flame).
Luckily, several months in to my stay in Ankara I realized a friend of mine had an oven in her flat, and was able to visit and make cookies, cornbread and brownies often enough to get my baking fix. This was especially nice once I had my precious vanilla extract. I found that the cookies I was able to make were great to share with people. Many people had never seen, let alone eaten a chocolate chip cookie; they became a method of cultural exchange and an excellent way to thank those people who, in various ways, helped make my experience in Turkey so positive.
Now, my flat has an oven and I average a batch of cookies every two or three weeks. I still have to improvise a bit -- I take a hammer to a bar of bitter chocolate instead of using those plastic-flavored chocolate chips, and for some reason my old standby recipe requires about a cup more flour when made in Turkey -- but it's a little taste of home that I can create in my kitchen and share with friends here. I'm not sure which I enjoy more, sharing freshly baked cookies with friends who miss homemade baked goods from the States, or sharing them with friends who've never tried a warm, soft chocolate chip cookie before.
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