Gözleme

I learned how to make gözleme when I worked in a cafe in Goreme, Cappadocia.  It's one of my favourite dishes.  In the cafe we had a variety of fillings:  cheese and spinach, sucuk (Turkish sausage) grated with egg, a mix of mashed potato and red pepper.  In fact you can use your imagination and come up with lots of different ideas.  The best cheese to use for gözleme is Lor, which is a curd cheese.  It's quite dry so doesn't make the dough too wet.

Gözleme is a kind of Turkish pancake made with yufka dough, made from flour, salt and water, which is very thin and soft.  I'm not sure if you can buy it outside of Turkey.  I guess the nearest thing to it would be filo pastry...although filo is not as soft as yufka.

The prepared gözleme is cooked on a slightly domed pan (almost like an upside-down wok) over a fire or a gas hob.  We have one which is attached to a gas bottle.  You can also use a large frying pan.

The sheets of yufka dough are round and you can buy them ready-made here, although lots of Turkish women make their own, particularly in the villages.

When preparing the gözleme you fold the top of the sheet of yufka dough to the middle, and the same with the bottom.  You brush beaten egg along the top and bottom straight edges and along the curved edge on the right.  You add your filling to the middle then fold the left side of the sheet to the middle, then the right...overlapping so that the beaten egg forms a seal.  You then have a rectangular parcel.   You heat your pan and grease it with margarine and cook the gözleme, moving it around and turning it over until it's cooked.  It only takes about 5 minutes.

As my camera isn't working at the moment  I've had to gather some photos from the internet to give you some idea:

Firstly a short video of yufka dough being rolled out:

Adding the filling

Folding the filled yufka

Cooking the gözleme

.....and the result...delicious gözleme