Turkish Cooking Challenge: Getting to Know the Dishes, Kitchen Utensils and Measures

As you start assisting a chef you will soon find out that the first thing you will learn is the dishes. I mean - the dishes, literally. Save your aspirations to learn the recipes and cool chef tricks for later as the first skill you will hone to perfection during your apprenticeship at a restaurant kitchen will be dish washing.



Just recall Ratatouille cartoon by Disney and Pixar: before being allowed any closer to food than washing or passing some ingredients Linguini, a kitchen assistant at the Gusteau restaurant, was subjected to doing dishes. Well, what about not a very recent invention of a dish washing machine, you may ask. Well, no one has abolished the manual labor, I will answer. Chefs are constantly using assorted dishes and kitchen utensils to mix ingredients, make sauces and cook the food; there is a reasonable stock of those at a restaurant kitchen but their turnover is naturally faster than the time required to collect a whole tray of items, wash and dry them. So as a chef assistant you position yourself next to the chef you are working with and try to understand the rationale of the chef's actions (well, ask if you don't but not always there is time for it). The idea is to catch and wash the dishes and utensils that are not needed any more but not to wash something which will still be used: for instance, once I nearly washed a frying pan in which a tuna steak was grilled yet the chef seized it last moment from my clueless hands and poured soy sauce on the hot pan so it started sizzling and with some magic become a sauce the tuna was served with. 

Yet if you think of it washing up has an important purpose - it does introduce you to a variety of kitchen utensils and serving dishes. As for the utensils I am not listing here all the existing in the worlds mixing bowls, cooking bowls, frying pans, pressure cookers, baking trays, cutting boards, ladles, spatulas, peelers and I am not even touching upon the mind-blowing variety on knifes a single restaurant would have - but trust me this is a lot to wash! And a lot to consider when selecting the utensils for working with a specific ingredients or making a specific dish: I've learnt there is a tiny metal spoon with toothed edges just to remove a tomato middle, then some smart person came up with a tubed device that is great to push out middles of pears and apples, besides here in Turkey they  use old-style wooden shredders with the metal shredding parts that help you get special shredding quality for the hard vegetables such as carrots and reddish to be used in the salads. I have been also having fun with the serving dishes: here we have flat rectangular ones convenient for buffets, small oval and rectangular plates to serve meze (starters), assorted bowls of glass, clay and plastic to serve salads and anything liquid, tiny round glass and plastic bowls that suit well for jams and dry fruits and nuts, and eternal round plates of various designs. Then come the glasses - large ones for cocktails, mid-sized to serve water that comes with food, small ones to serve water that comes with coffee, thin long ones for rak?, red and white wine glasses, then small glasses and cups for Turkish tea and coffee and the large versions for the tea bags and instant coffee. Then spoons, forks and knifes of table and desert size, then coffee spoons - all doubled as some are used for food preparation and the others are to serve the guests. This may be potentially tripled as some restaurant owners are particularly keen on keeping a variety of glasses or plates for the sake of it - just as it is boring to serve water in the same glasses.

The aspect that comes hand in hand with dishes is cooking measures. On my first day at a farm I was going through a small food recipe supplement to a Turkish daily and I was astound by the fact  that tea glass is used as a key measure. In a few days I was noting done some recipes by Zeliha Han?m and the whole truth was revealed to me. When it comes to cooking measures in Turkey there is tea glass (çay barda??, 125 ml) and water glass (su barda??, 250 ml). Then as for the spoons there is a tea spoon (çay ka????) which the rest of the world would refer as a coffee spoon, desert spoon (tatl? ka????), or tea spoon for most of us outside of Turkey and soup spoon (çorba ka????) which we know as table spoon. Is that not a whole new planet of measures? It is quite interesting to note that in each country cooking measure units are derived from the most used kitchen utensils.  In that light it is rather natural to think that in such a prominent tea drinking country as Turkey tea glass would be a natural measure. Think cultural relativism in gastronomy and never again assume that a glass of flour means the same quantity of flour they would use in other geographies.