PIDE BREAD: SPONGY TURKISH BREAD STUFFED WITH LAMB

The "pide" is a flattened and fermented Turkish bread. There are two types of "bread pide", the filling and the flat. The stuffed bread is known as "İçli pide, and unfilled bread is called ekmeği, a little thicker than the previous one but without filling.

The "İçli pide" is elongated, canoe-shaped stuffed with meat stews or combinations of feta cheese and vegetables. This post is about the bread "filling pide ".

What is the origin of the "Pide Bread"?

This bread is undoubted of Turkish origin. Clearly, lahmacun, or so-called Turkish pizza, is the predecessor of the pide's bread, albeit without yeast. But how and why did bread start to ferment? In ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, the wheat dough was already made for bread. This dough was cooked in stone ovens.

The fermentation process started spontaneously. The dough was probably made a few hours in advance, and for some reason, it didn't cook. The combination of the hot climate and the spores in the environment caused the dough to ferment. And it is easy to conclude that food was scarce and it was not easy to discard food. But many may have noticed that this caused the bread to increase in size, last longer, and get a pleasant acid taste.

This process was refined over the years to get the commercial yeasts that we know today.

For this reason, historians place unleavened bread such as chapati, and pita bread as older recipes than recipes that do contain yeast as pide's bread.

The first versions of the pide's bread were prepared by the poor, and before cooking they were filled with what people had on hand. Thanks to this we have such a wide variety of fillings.

In Ramadan time, Muslims consume ekmeği pide. That is, without filler. This bread is smeared with a little egg, to give it the color, and garnished with Nigella seeds.

Typical fillings of the Pide

1. Kavurma: the favorite filling of this bread is minced beef or sheep meat. Sautéed with enough butter and vegetables.

2. Cheese: filled with mixtures of white cheeses. Feta, pastirma, sucuk, or champis combined with spinach or chard.

3. Yağlı Pide: it is a variety of round bread. Fried eggs and butter are added on the top to the dough before cooking.