Also at the Turkish market were fried cauliflower pancakes, wrapped in pita bread and topped with yogurt sauce, lettuce, tomatoes, and corn. It could have been crispier and hotter, but still tasty - the inside was creamy and light, probably cauliflower mixed with eggs and spices, and the tangy yogurt sauce is one of my favorites on anything.
And as a Midwesterner, I couldn't pass up the grilled corn. Not anywhere near as good as those sweet, golden, late-July, Minnesota-grown ears straight from the farmer's market, but for mid-February Berlin? Delicious.
Just around the corner from the market, in the heart of the heavily Turkish-influenced Kreuzberg neighborhood, was a bakery offering cookies, baklava, and tulumba. Originating in Turkey but popular around the Eastern Mediterranean, tulumba is deep-fried dough soaked in honey. You really can't go wrong with any combination of fried pastry dough and sugar, but this was particularly delicious and I inhaled it in about three seconds.
At another market on the other side of Berlin, in Charlottenburg, we found the most incredible vollkornbrot. The woman we bought it from explained that it was made without any flour, just whole grains and seeds.
It was dense, dark, flavorful, moist - gooey, actually - and sooo good. We ate it plain, with a fork!
At a neighboring stall were little tubs of pork lard, a steal at just 75 cents for 100 grams. We passed that one up.
One of the most popular street foods in Berlin (and in our experience, in Spain and France too) is the kebap: lamb or chicken sliced off giant rotating spits is piled into pita bread with lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber, and plenty of yogurt sauce. You can also get it with falafel, crispy spheres of deep-fried chickpea batter, as we do. At a tiny Sudanese place, you can get a falafel kebap with peanut sauce instead! I got the falafel plate, which included fried carrots and potatoes (so good!) and a creamy, babaganoush-like eggplant dip. The smooth, rich peanut sauce was a wonderful variation, and it went well with the crunchy falafel. As we were eating, their peanut butter delivery arrived - several five-gallon buckets handed over the counter.
We had some more awesome Turkish food this weekend at a cool market in the Charlottenburg area. Everything was so fresh and flavorful, and it is interesting to try new combinations of spices. My favorite is the mixture of rice, spinach, onions and carrots (upper right). It was so good, we had to go in search of bread when we finished it to soak up the rest of the sauce!
We'll be sad to leave Berlin and all the international treats it offers, but between Spain, Italy, and Morocco, there will be plenty more delicious things to try.
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