Many Many Simits of Turkey or is it Gevrek

İzmirliler simide gevrek demez, İzmirli olmayanlar gevreğe simit der.

See also: OED | Simit Makes the Grade OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY

Word Origin | Simit

Mavi Boncuk |

İstanbul Simidi[1]: | Istanbul Bagel: The dough weight is high, the salt content is high, double auger is made and hot boiler is not used. That's why it tastes different. Today, bakeries that use molasses on them do not exceed one finger. It is usually colored with burnt sugar. If you see a golden yellow bagel, don't miss it, know that it is molasses.

İzmir Gevreği | İzmir  Crisp:  Thin, low in salt, crispy crispy cereal. Its construction, dough and technique are different.

Ankara Simidi: People of Ankara are very proud of their bagels, they are really crispy. It is claimed that molasses is used abundantly by boasting of its dark color, but its dark color gives burned sugar.

Eskişehir Simidi: They say that it changes the taste of Kalabak juice, and the hardness of the water in pastries really changes the flavor. It is also cooked in a wood oven.

Nevşehir Simidi:: A version of the Aleppo bagel made with chickpea leavened. It also contains chickpea yeast. It is shaped like a pastry.

Kastamonu Gevreği | Kastamonu Crisp: Made without sesame but with molasses, it is golden yellow. It is eaten as soon as it comes out of the oven and is unlikely to be found during the rest of the day.

Source: From Nejat Yentürk's  book "Ayaküstü İzmir".

Ayaküstü Izmir - Sokak ve Firin Lezzetleri Paperback – January 1, 2018

Oglak Yayincilik (January 1, 2018) | Turkish

Paperback ‏ : ‎ 480 pages

ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9753299419

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-9753299411

In addition to reading the street delicacies that have become the symbol of the culture of this elegant port city in İzmir, you will discover wooden-cased greengrocer carts, İzmir kari sherbet jars, cold cutlery windows, and taste the fast food cuisine of a city while reading.

This book is the most neglected part of our gastronomy literature; leans over our kitchen. A kitchen area that has hardly found a place in our cookbooks…

Ayaküstü İzmir is a scientific study, a source book, away from superficial approaches, aiming to eliminate information pollution and urban legends. It is not only limited to Izmir cuisine, but also focuses on the favorite examples of our traditional cuisine, from börek, doner kebab, sherbet to kokorec, with new approaches.

On the other hand, he tries to read the history of Izmir, which has a rich culinary culture, from the streets and through the fast-paced cuisine.

REVIEW: Over the last couple of centuries, Izmir was the most important seaport city of the Ottoman Empire. There were dozens of recipes for street food, originated from Turkish, Sephardic Jewish, Greek and Armenian kitchen. This book is about the cultural history of street foods in a cosmopolitan seaport city, how they are formed, manufactured and sold, as well as investigating the multicultural traces in today's street foods.

[1] Simit is a circular bread, typically encrusted with sesame seeds or, less commonly, poppy, flax or sunflower seeds, found across the cuisines of the former Ottoman Empire, and the Middle East. Simit's size, crunch, chewiness, and other characteristics vary slightly by region. It is widely known as Turkish bagel in the United States.

In İzmir, simit is known as gevrek ("crisp"), although it is very similar to the Istanbul variety. Simit in Ankara are smaller and crisper than those of other cities.

Archival sources show that simit has been produced in Istanbul since 1525.[10] Based on Üsküdar court records (Şer’iyye Sicili) dated 1593, the weight and price of simit was standardized for the first time. The 17th-century traveler Evliya Çelebi wrote that there were 70 simit bakeries in Istanbul during the 1630s.[12] Jean Brindesi's early 19th-century oil paintings about Istanbul daily life show simit sellers on the streets.[13] Warwick Goble, too, made an illustration of these simit sellers of Istanbul in 1906. Simit and its variants became popular across the Ottoman Empire. Girde (Uygur: Гирде), is a type of bread baked on the walls of tandoori oven, that is very similar to simit, and that the Uyghurs in China see as a characteristic item in their culture-specific kitchen.

Simit is generally served plain, or for breakfast with tea, fruit preserves, or cheese or ayran. Drinking tea with simit is traditional. Simit ("Bokegh" in Armenian) is a traditional Christmas bread in Armenia.[citation needed]

Simit are sold by street vendors in Turkey, who either have a simit trolley or carry the simit in a tray on their head. Street merchants generally advertise simit as fresh ("Taze simit!"/"Taze gevrek!") since they are baked throughout the day; otherwise hot ("Sıcak, sıcak!") and extremely hot ("El yakıyor!" means "It burns the hand!") when they are not long out of the oven.[citation needed]

Simit is an important symbol for lower and middle-class people of Turkey. Sometimes it is called susam kebabı ("sesame kebab").

In other parts of the Middle East, it is consumed with boiled eggs and/or duggah, which is a mixture of herbs used as condiments. It is commonly used to break the fast, with yoghurt or buttermilk, in mosques in Mecca and Medina.

Today, many municipalities in Turkey produce simit through their own subsidiaries

Certain varieties of Romanian covrigi are similar to simit, the places that sell them even being known as "Simigerii".

Main ingredients: Dough (flour, water, yeast, salt),sesame seeds.

Variations: also called Shureik, Ka'ak, and SameeAnother type of bread similar to simit is known as obwarzanek (in particular obwarzanek krakowski) in Poland and bublik in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. The main difference is that the rings of dough are poached briefly in boiling water prior to baking (similarly to bagels), instead of being dipped in water and molasses syrup, as is the case with simit.

  

Alternative names bokegh (Armenia), Đevrek (Bosnia, Serbia), koulouri (Greece), covrig (Romania), gevrek (Bulgaria)