Trabzon Pidesi

A baker in Trabzon presses a ball of risen dough out thin but with some give, then folds the rim inward into a low wall so the middle becomes a shallow dish. Into that dish goes a drift of grated cheese, the stretchy salt-free kolot mixed with a white cheese, and the tray slides into a hot oven. Within minutes the rim has blistered gold and the cheese has slumped into a single glossy sheet that touches the wall on every side. Then the butter arrives, a generous knob dragged around the crust and left to run into the middle, and the pide leaves the oven shining. A Black Sea bakery produces this plain-looking round in a few minutes, and most of what it tastes of comes off the dairy.

The cheese and the butter carry the dish, and both are products of Trabzon's highland pastures, the yaylalar above the coast. Kolot is the same cheese that goes into muhlama and kuymak, the corn-flour and cheese dishes of the region, and it melts into long elastic strands with only a faint salt. Butter hits the hot rim with a small hiss, and the smell that lifts is browned wheat and warm dairy. The first mouthful is a crisp, buttered edge, then a soft floor of dough under molten cheese, mild and milky rather than sharp, with the butter pooled at the bottom of each bite.

Timing decides whether it works. The usual home method bakes the dough alone for about five minutes, add the cheese for another five, then pull the tray to crack an egg into the centre and spread butter, letting the oven's leftover heat set the white while the yolk stays loose. A one-pass method adds the egg two to three minutes before the end. Oven temperatures in the recipes run from about 200 to 240 C. Overbake the egg and the yolk turns chalky; leave the pide waiting on a counter and the cheese goes rubbery, which is why it is eaten straight from the oven.

The register of the dish sits between breakfast and a main course. People tear the buttered rim in pieces and drag them through the yolk and the melted cheese, so the crust acts as spoon, plate and bread at once. Round is the usual outline in Trabzon, though a wide boat shape turns up too, and the name locals use is yağlı pide, buttered pide. A minced-meat version, kıymalı, has been made only in recent years, and the kaşarlı version is eaten hot, since kaşar loses its stretch as it cools.

The Bafra pidesi, a cousin to the west in Samsun province, closes its dough over beef into a half-metre tube, while the Trabzon pide stays open to the oven. That openness is why the cheese can brown at the edges and why the egg can sit on top. Left open, the cheese blisters at the edges, the egg sits on top where the oven can reach it, and butter touches every surface. It eats loose and rich, and it leaves a sheen of butter on the fingers before the tray is empty.

Sürmene, a Neighbouring Oven, and a 2019 Application

No record names a first baker of the Trabzon pide. The pide is said to have originated in Sürmene, the coastal district east of Trabzon city, and spread across the country from there. The same dish is sold under two names, Sürmene pidesi and Trabzon yağlı pidesi, and bakeries around the city bake their own versions of it.

The date that records do hold sits with the bread beside it. In Vakfıkebir, a district to the west, Sarı Ahmet opened the first bread oven in 1897 in the Hoşarlı quarter, and a relative opened a second in 1902. The town's large round sourdough loaf, baked in stone ovens, was registered as a geographical indication on 3 August 2018 (registration no. 372, applied for by the Vakfıkebir municipality on 30 November 2017). Sürmene and Vakfıkebir are both districts of Trabzon province, on the same stretch of coast.

On 10 June 2019 the Sürmene municipality, the Sürmene tradesmen's guild, and the Sürmene knife-makers' association filed together to register the pide, and the Turkish patent office granted the geographical indication under the name Sürmene pidesi. The grant is dated to 2020 or the spring of 2021, and the 2019 filing is the date on which the accounts agree.