{Recipe} My Version of a Vegan Turkish Breakfast – 1: Start of the Series

As you are familiar from my former posts I love the Turkish breakfast culture and I think the breakfast is the most important meal of the day. When I used to live in Istanbul I like to prepare a breakfast at home or I used to go out to one of my favorite breakfast places to have a long and rich breakfast. I love the variety of food you get served in small bowls, the fresh bread, the mix of salty and sweet items and of course çay, the Turkish black tea. The Turkish word for breakfast is kahvaltı, which actually means before coffee. After the breakfast you can drink coffee, but you never drink coffee with the breakfast.

After living in Istanbul for one year I returned back to Germany and I really miss Turkish food. Luckily you can find many Turkish restaurants and supermarkets in Germany, but most of the Turkish restaurants here are serving döner. Since I head been missing the Turkish breakfast I wanted to prepare it by myself. When a friend called me and said she wanted to visit me, I decided to prepare it for that occasion. We traveled Turkey many times, we saw different regions of the country and had Turkish breakfast together countless times. So she would be the guest to appreciate this kind of breakfast. I checked some recipes online and in cookbooks. I bought some of the ingredients in the supermarket and ordered the others online.

But I didn’t want to prepare a regular breakfast, I wanted to create my own version and make it a vegan breakfast! I’m not eating a 100% strict vegan diet, but I like to create vegan versions of not-vegan recipes and to get creative with new ingredients. In this post I will show you how my vegan Turkish breakfast looked like and which breakfast items I exactly had. In the following four posts I will be sharing the relative recipes with you.

 

List of breakfast items:

• Simit poğaça (sesame bread with different fillings)
• Red beet hummus
• Olives
• Dried apricots & figs
• Çay (Turkish black tea)
• Tomatoes & cucumbers
• Helva (a sweet made of tahini)
• Tahin pekmez (sesame paste with grape molasses)
• Kivi reçeli (kiwi jam)
• Acuka (breakfast spread with pepper paste and walnuts)

 

Stay tuned for the next post, where I will share my recipe for the vegan simit poğaça!

Swanni