Karides Ekmek

On a harbor front in Bodrum a cook drops a handful of floured shrimp into hot oil and starts counting, because the difference between a good karides ekmek and a rubber one is about thirty seconds of attention. This is the coast applying its standard sandwich to shellfish: shrimp, fried or grilled, loaded into the same ekmek that the far more famous fish version uses, dressed with the same onion and lemon. Shrimp cook fast and turn to rubber the instant they pass done, so the whole sandwich is really a contest with the clock, the bread there to carry the catch and soak whatever fat or sea-juice it gives off. Get the timing and it is sweet and snapping; miss it by a beat and no amount of lemon saves it.

The build is short and the window is narrow. Shrimp are peeled and then either dusted in flour and fried until the coating crisps and the flesh just turns opaque, or threaded onto a skewer and grilled hard until they take a little char and curl. Either way the cook has seconds to pull them at the right moment. A length of ekmek is opened and its cut faces usually toasted on the grill so the bread firms up and resists the moisture to come, and the shrimp go in hot. Tomato, raw onion tossed with sumac, a few leaves of something green, and a squeeze of lemon finish it. The construction could not be simpler; the shellfish and the timing are the entire difficulty, and everything else is there to frame them.

The failures all come back to the shrimp and the bread. Pulled late, the shrimp bounce instead of snap, gone to the texture of an eraser, and that is the one mistake the sandwich cannot hide. A fry coating that goes on too wet, or shrimp packed in while still steaming, turns the crust limp and pale between the bread instead of crisp. Skip the lemon and onion and the whole thing tastes flat and faintly of the sea and nothing else, the richness with no sharp edge to cut it. And bread left untoasted under hot, juicy shrimp soaks through and turns to paste before the sandwich is finished. What good looks like is narrow: shrimp cooked just to the point of opacity and no further, a coating that stays crisp, and enough acid and onion to keep the sweetness of the shellfish bright.

It is made and eaten at the water, and it smells of it: hot oil and the sweet brine of shrimp, lemon cutting across the top as it is squeezed. The bread is warm and a little crusted where the grill caught the cut face. The first bite gives the snap of properly cooked shrimp, then the sweet clean shellfish flavor, then the sumac-sharp onion and the lemon hitting bright behind it. Where the shrimp were fried there is a thin crackle of coating against the soft bread; where grilled, a faint smoke and char. The tomato is cool and the green leaf fresh against the warm fry. It is light for a fried-seafood sandwich, eaten standing by the harbor with the boats in front of you, salt in the air doing half the seasoning.

The setting is the culture here as much as any ordering phrase, and it is firmly the Aegean and the coast rather than the Istanbul waterfront the fish version owns. You buy it at a seafront stall or a small balıkçı in Bodrum, in İzmir, in the harbor towns, where the day's shellfish is cheap and the format is reflex. The call is fried or grilled, kızartma or ızgara, and a regular might ask for extra lemon or for the onion heavy. A glass of something cold and the sea breeze are assumed. It belongs to a coast that turns whatever the boats bring in into a sandwich, and shrimp are simply one more thing the bread is asked to carry.

The variation runs along the fried-versus-grilled split and how the coast dresses it. Fried eats richer and leans on the crunch of the coating; grilled is cleaner and lets a little smoke through. The dressing is usually kept light, lemon and onion doing the work, though some stalls add a garlic or yogurt sauce or a spoon of ezme for heat. What this is not is the fish-in-bread it descends from, the famous balık ekmek built on grilled mackerel, which is a large subject of its own and a different protein with a different history; the shrimp version is its coastal cousin, not a sub-type of it. The karides reading stands on precision, shrimp pulled the instant they are done, a loaf set up not to go soggy, and the lemon and onion to keep it sharp.

Origin and history

The shrimp sandwich has no inventor and no documented origin, and any single date offered for it should be treated as a guess. It is an obvious coastal variation on a documented dish, the work of harbor cooks swapping one piece of the day's catch for another, and its real history is borrowed from the fish version it copies. That parent dish, the fish-in-bread, has a genuine and datable record. Balık ekmek, grilled or fried fish in a Turkish loaf, has been eaten on the Istanbul waterfront since the mid-nineteenth century, when fish pulled straight from the Bosphorus were grilled and served on bread by the shore.

The Eminönü boat tradition is the documented heart of it. By the late nineteenth century families from the Black Sea coast worked the trade at Eminönü, grilling fish on small boats moored to the quay and passing the sandwiches up to the crowd, a profession handed father to son. The shrimp version carries none of this paper trail of its own; it simply takes that established coastal format, the split loaf and the onion and the lemon, and runs the day's shellfish through it instead of a mackerel fillet.

For the shrimp version there is no shop, no date, and no name to record, only a coast doing the obvious thing with whatever the nets bring up. What can be dated belongs to the parent, and lately it is municipal rather than culinary. The Istanbul Preservation Board ordered the fish-sandwich boats out of Eminönü in 2004, and in 2007 the city granted a small number of formal mooring tenders to the elaborately decorated Ottoman-style boats that grill mackerel on the Eminönü waterfront to this day.