🇹🇷 Turkey · Family: Gözleme
Ballı Kaymak Gözleme is the sweet version of gözleme: a thin hand rolled flatbread filled with honey and clotted cream, ballı for honeyed and kaymak for the cream. Most gözleme is savoury, filled with cheese, spinach or potato, so the sweet form is the traditional dessert and breakfast end of the same craft. The angle is the cooking method doing the work. Where honey and cream on plain bread is a cold assembly, here the same pairing is sealed into dough and griddled, so the bread crisps, the cream softens toward melting, and the honey warms and runs.
The build is the gözleme technique with a sweet filling. A piece of dough is rolled out very thin, often on a low round table with a long thin pin, until it is almost translucent. Kaymak is spread over one half or the centre, honey is drizzled over the cream, and the dough is folded into a square or half moon to seal the filling inside. It goes onto a sac, the convex iron griddle, and is cooked dry on both sides until the bread is blistered and crisp in patches, sometimes brushed with a little butter. Good execution is about thinness and heat. The dough should be rolled fine so it cooks through to a crisp rather than staying doughy, and the griddle hot enough to set the outside fast before the filling leaks. Inside, the kaymak should go soft and molten while staying rich, and the honey should warm without scorching. Sloppy versions roll the dough thick so it is bready and heavy, overfill so cream and honey burst the seam onto the griddle and burn, or cook it slow so the bread is pale and limp instead of crisp.
Variations come from the cream, the honey and small additions. Pine honey gives a darker, resinous result; blossom honey keeps it light and floral, and the difference is large. Some cooks add crushed walnuts inside for crunch, or finish with an extra spoon of cream and a thread of honey on top once it comes off the griddle. The same honey and cream pairing also appears simply layered into bread cold, but that Bal Kaymak Ekmek is a different build and deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here. As a sweet gözleme, this is the version where heat and a thin crisp shell turn two cold ingredients into something warm and contrasting.
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Other Gözleme sandwiches in Turkey: