🇹🇷 Turkey · Family: Türk sofrası: ekmek, turşu & yanında
Bazlama is a thick, soft flatbread cooked on a griddle, eaten across Turkey and used widely as the base for breakfast sandwiches. It is not a filled sandwich in itself; it is the bread, and it earns a place here because of the role it plays. Where a thin lavaş is made for rolling and a crusty loaf for splitting, bazlama is made for tearing, folding and stuffing while it is still warm and pliable. The angle is the texture: a soft, slightly chewy crumb with a lightly charred surface, sturdy enough to hold a filling without going stiff.
The make is simple flatbread work. A soft dough of flour, water, salt and usually yeast or a leavening is rested, divided, and patted or rolled into rounds noticeably thicker than lavaş, roughly a centimetre or so. Each round is cooked dry on a hot griddle or a sac, the iron plate used for flatbreads, turned once or twice so it puffs slightly and takes brown blistered spots on both sides while staying soft inside. Good bazlama is springy and tender with a faintly elastic chew, the surface speckled with char but the crumb still moist; it should fold without cracking even after it has cooled a little. The flavour is plain and clean, which is the point, because it is a carrier. Sloppy bazlama is rolled too thin so it dries to a cracker, cooked too long so the crust hardens and the inside goes tough, or underproofed so it is dense and bready rather than soft and open.
Its role is where the variations live. Warm and fresh it is torn at the breakfast table and eaten with cheese, butter, honey or jam, or split and filled to make a soft handheld sandwich. It also gets used as the bread for a griddled toasted sandwich, but that Bazlama Tost is its own build and deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here. Some bakers enrich the dough slightly with milk or yoghurt for a softer crumb, and thickness varies by region and household. The thing to understand about bazlama is that it is infrastructure: a good soft flatbread that makes the sandwiches built on it work, and a poor one that lets them down before any filling goes in.
More from this family
Other Türk sofrası: ekmek, turşu & yanında sandwiches in Turkey: