Çintar Mushroom Risotto Recipe

It's that time of year again; the days are shorter and cooler, there's a dampness to the cold night air...and the beautiful çintar mushrooms sprout beneath the pine trees of Fethiye. As you are no doubt aware by now, we enjoy our Turkish seasonal produce and the çintar mushroom season is one we particularly look forward to. Perhaps it's because the season is really short so we feel the need to dive straight in there and snap up as many as we can. Or, maybe it's just simply because this mushroom is downright delicious!

Çintar mushrooms on Çalış Market last December

I mentioned in last year's çintar mushroom post that they were really tasty, eaten with scrambled egg. They are! This year however, we're trying to add a bit of variation to our mushroom diet. After I did the spinach and cheese börek recipe last week, we still had some spinach left over so Barry decided to produce Çintar Mushroom and Spinach Risotto. Risotto is perfect this time of year; oozy and comforting and these seasonal mushrooms fitted the dish perfectly.

The traditional rice for making risotto is arborio rice. You can buy it from supermarkets in Fethiye but it's expensive compared to local rice and to be honest, Turkish rice is just as starchy. We always use Turkish rice and the results are perfectly acceptable.

   Mmm - meaty but meat-free risotto

Many people are put off making risotto because you have to stand over it and tend to it constantly. But, it's not difficult and it's worth a little attention just for the final results. We love risotto! This recipe makes two decent-sized portions.

• First of all, in a pan, bring around 1.5 litres of stock (chicken or veg) to the boil and leave to simmer.


• In a separate pan, melt a knob of butter, add a chopped onion and fry gently for a couple of minutes.


• Next, throw in some chopped chillies (optional), a clove of garlic and fry for a few minutes.


• Once the onion has softened, add one mug of Arborio or Turkish rice and stir to coat all the grains. Add some salt at this point.


• Throw in a few handfuls of roughly chopped (not too small because you want to keep the flavour and feel the texture of the mushroom) çintar mushroom and stir. Obviously, you can use other types of mushroom if you can't get çintar mushrooms!


• Stir the mixture for a couple of minutes. At this point, it's traditional to add a splash of vermouth to your risotto but we stick to the stock otherwise, in Turkey, your risotto will suddenly rocket in price. 


• Get a ladle full of stock from your simmering pan and add it to the rice and mushroom. Stir gently with a wooden spoon until the stock evaporates.


• Take another ladle full and repeat the process. Keep adding a ladle full of the stock and stirring till it evaporates until your rice is al dente. 


• Keep testing it as you don't want to end up with a plate of mush. A risotto should have the rice grains intact and the starch should have created an oozy sauce.

Delicious, oozy çintar mushroom & spinach risotto

• Once you're happy the rice is cooked, remove from the heat, add a small knob of butter and some Parmesan cheese and stir.


• Add a couple of handfuls of chopped spinach, cover the pan and leave it to stand for five minutes.


• Mix in the spinach and serve. (If you're being very naughty, a drizzle of olive oil over the top does taste really nice - but I don't put it on. Cheese and butter is more than enough guilt for me.)

Seasonal Food in Turkey - Bergamot(?) & Christmas Greetings

Another seasonal Turkish food discovery - bergamot

Anyone seen these before? We went to Cafe Pazar yesterday to arrange a hire car for Monday and to wish our friends a Merry Christmas. As we were sitting and chatting, one of our friends walked in with another man and they were carrying these. Apparently, they are called bergamot.



I've done a quick investigation on Google Images and typically, these two lumpy fruits do not resemble any of the photos on there. Maybe these are special Turkish bergamot! They're from our friend's mum's tree in her front garden, so they definitely grow here in Fethiye, and she had just made the jam/jelly that you can see in the middle of the two fruits. It was still warm and really aromatic. A bit like a mild, perfumed marmalade. Pleasant on the taste buds.



Bergamot is also the fruit that is used to make Earl Grey tea and the oil from the fruit is used in the fragrance industry. It's the rind and the skin that is used as the fruit inside is really sour. Yet more useful / useless pieces of information we have learnt since starting Turkey's For Life! Thought it was a nice one to leave you with over Christmas.

To all of you who read Turkey's For Life;

thanks for reading and, if you celebrate it, have a fabulous, merry Christmas! Happy Holidays!

Seasonal Food in Turkey - Hurma of a Different Variety

This is another new and mysterious Turkish seasonal food that has just hit our radar. Anyone ever seen it before? When we went to our friends' house on Christmas Day to eat aşure, this was handed over to take with us. Neither of us had ever seen it before nor had a clue what it was!

Another unknown Turkish seasonal fruit - hurma

Our friend told us that the person he bought it from explained to him that it was hurma. This is where the Turkish language can become a bit confusing as hurma is generally used to mean currents and raisins - but, as we discovered and wrote last year, hurma is also used to describe the super-sweet fruit, persimmon. We've all had a taste (it's the gnarled brown shapes that you eat) and agree that it tastes a bit like a mild-flavoured raisin but with a drier texture.



If anyone knows an alternative name to the hurma in this photo, we'd love to know as we're very curious about it. Having never seen it before, we also noticed it was for sale on Çalış market on Sunday. It's serving as a festive decoration in our house at the moment - well, I think there's something oddly pretty and festive-looking about it.

Seasonal Food in Turkey - Citrus Fruit

Many people come out to Fethiye at this time of year with the idea of enjoying a change of scenery while seeing in the New Year. As tends to be the norm during these festive periods, flights from all over the world are swapped, changed and cancelled and destination airports are altered. During the early hours of 28th December, our friends landed at Bodrum Milas Airport. Yes, they should have landed at Dalaman Airport but I'm starting to feel like Christmas wouldn't be Christmas if we didn't have to set off on a jaunt along the southern coast of Turkey to pick friends up.



I love to drive and make longer journeys more interesting by stopping off here and there. If there's no rush, what's the point of hurtling along the road, straight to your destination? There are many little places along that road waiting to be explored. Some are going to be better than others, but how do we know if we don't see for ourselves? We set off from Fethiye during mid-morning on the 27th December and paid a visit to Marmaris and Akyaka en route to Bodrum. We also made one other little stop...

  Köyceğiz citrus fruit stalls

Köyceğiz is a large village west of Dalaman airport and it is a major production area for citrus fruits. Orange and lemon groves line the road on either side, vivid green leaves and branches straining under the weight of juicy oranges. Trailers sit in lay-bys, overflowing with fruit waiting to be towed to market. And every few metres, stalls like this sell the juiciest, tastiest citrus fruits. Of course, this could be purely psychological but the tangerines seem to taste so much sweeter from these stalls. There's something really enjoyable about pulling up by the side of the road and jumping out for the car to buy a couple of kilos of tangerines for the journey - or are we just easily pleased?

Seasonal citrus fruit in Turkey

I don't know how many tangerines we got through before we reached our first stop of Marmaris. Too many - but we did manage to save some to share with our friends on the way back to Fethiye.