Simit Bal Kaymak

Split a sesame ring flat and the breakfast version of it wants cream and honey, not cheese. Simit bal kaymak opens the ring through its thickness and fills it with kaymak, the thick clotted cream of the Turkish table, then lays honey over the cream, and the pleasure of it is almost wholly a matter of texture and temperature: a chewy, faintly bitter sesame crust, a cool dense slab of cream that holds its shape, and honey running in the seam between them. It is the morning-table reading of a bread that goes savoury the rest of the day.

The cream is the thing to understand, because it is not whipped or pourable. Kaymak is made by simmering milk slowly, often water buffalo milk, then cooling it so a thick skin of cream rises and sets, and it carries somewhere around sixty percent fat, dense and buttery and barely sweet. Against the assertive toasted sesame of the ring, thin cream simply vanishes, which is why it goes on in a generous cool slab. Honey is the only other thing in the build, and it is drizzled over the kaymak rather than onto the bread, so it sits on the cream and sweetens the bite without soaking straight into the crumb.

It is short to build and easy to wreck. The ring has to be fresh, its crust still crisp and its crumb still chewy, because a soft stale ring has nothing to play against the cream and goes to paste under it. The kaymak spread too thin lets the sesame bully it and the whole thing reads only of toasted crust. Honey poured on too freely turns it into a sticky soak, the bread sodden, the seam bleeding out the sides. And the halves are closed gently rather than pressed, because squeezing the ring pushes the soft cream straight out at the cut and leaves a dry shell in the hand.

The first bite is the sesame, dark and faintly bitter at the points where it toasted hardest, then the crust gives and the cool cream arrives behind it, dense and buttery and quiet, and then the honey lands sweet and floral over both. The cream is cold against the room-temperature bread, the sesame flakes off onto your fingers, and the chew of the ring runs long against the soft give of the kaymak. A few crushed nuts, if a shop adds them, put a third crackle into it. It is eaten slowly, with tea, a small rich start to a morning rather than a fast street bite.

It belongs to the Turkish breakfast and to the sweet end of the simit case, where the same ring carries chocolate spread or a layer of tahin and pekmez for those who want the morning sweeter still. The proportions are the whole argument: a restrained thread of honey keeps the kaymak the lead and the sweetness a backnote, while a heavy hand pushes the ring toward dessert. Bal kaymak is itself a standing Turkish breakfast pairing, cream and honey eaten off any fresh bread, and putting it inside a split ring is simply the most portable way to carry it.

The savoury rings are a different proposition built on salt, the ring split around white cheese, or the yellow kaşar, or thin spiced cured beef, none of which share anything with this but the sesame loop. What the bal kaymak label reliably means is cream and honey treated as the entire filling: a cool, dense slab of clotted cream with honey laced over it, closed inside a ring fresh enough to stay crisp under the weight. Split through and filled, with crust closing over the cream top and bottom, it is structurally a sandwich, sweet where the rest of the case is savoury but assembled on the same logic.

The cream is the old part

The ring and the cream both have long pasts, but in this sandwich the cream reaches deeper into the record. Kaymak, the clotted cream at the centre of the build, is named in Mahmud al-Kashgari's eleventh-century lexicon of the Turkic tongues, a compendium called Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk that he presented in Baghdad in 1074, which puts the word, and the thing, into the written record nearly a thousand years ago.

The cream also has a place that prizes it. Afyonkarahisar, in western Anatolia, is the city most associated with fine kaymak, where the local reputation rests on water buffalo fed in part on the residue of poppy seeds pressed for oil, a feed held to give the cream its particular density and flavour. The honey that finishes the sandwich is a separate larder staple with its own regional sources, but it is the buffalo cream of places like Afyon that defines what a good kaymak tastes like.

So the morning ring is a recent, portable wrapper around a very old filling. Nobody recorded who first spread clotted cream and honey inside a split simit, and the pairing is everyday Turkish breakfast custom rather than a dated invention. The cream is the part with a paper trail: written into the language by al-Kashgari in 1074, and still skimmed today from the poppy-fed water buffalo of Afyonkarahisar, the western Anatolian city whose dairy set the standard for what kaymak should be.