Turks Brood

Sphinx II, a shop in Hoorn, lists a Turks brood döner under the same heading as its ordinary broodjes döner kebab, and the placement shows how the loaf is read in Dutch kitchens: as a roll the size of a dinner plate. The cook splits it horizontally, toasts the cut faces, and packs in the meat with garlic sauce and sambal, then onion, red and white cabbage, iceberg and tomato. The thin crust bends around the pile without cracking, and the first bite is a dry rasp of toasted crumb followed by cold cabbage and hot, sauced meat. Garlic sauce and sambal are the Dutch pairing for döner.

The same loaf works cold at home. One recipe spreads hummus on a cut face and thick yoghurt on the other, stacks tomato, twenty cucumber slices, sheep's cheese and salad on the base, dresses it with lemon juice, white balsamic and olive oil, then wraps it in cling film with a plate on top and leaves it in the fridge for two to three hours. The weight compacts the airy crumb until the bread turns dense and slightly damp-soft, with the yoghurt cool against the tongue and the cucumber still snapping. Cut into wedges, it makes a picnic loaf, and it holds together because a wide flat bread gives the filling a large, even surface to lie against.

A long rise builds the flavor and the big holes, and the hot oven closes the crust fast, so it stays thin. That thinness suits a wet filling and shortens the shelf life: the crumb is so airy that it dries within a day, and by evening the crust has gone leathery and the holes have lost their spring. A stale one tears at the fold and shreds into crumbs. Dutch bread guides pair it with tzatziki, lamb ham and tomato, with hummus, alfalfa and aged cheese, or with fresh cream cheese, horseradish, cucumber and shrimp, all combinations that want a fresh, pliable base.

Most households meet it as a par-baked loaf. Albert Heijn sells a 500 g Turks brood, and the pack says to finish it in the middle of a 200°C oven for 8 to 10 minutes, or 4 minutes in an air fryer. The sesame warms and gives off its smell as the crust crisps back, and the loaf goes from pale and soft to golden at the rim. From there it becomes Turks brood with minced meat, courgette and harissa mayonnaise, or a Turks broodje with vegetarian döner, each split and filled while the crumb is still warm enough to give.

The name is a Dutch label, and pide is what the Dutch call Turks brood. The round Ramazan pidesi, topped with sesame and nigella seeds, is eaten at iftar and sahur during Ramadan, and in a Turkish bakery the shelves carry this bread beside somun and simit. Snack-bar menus tend to print only "Turks brood" next to a price, which is how a shop in Hoorn can fit it as one line in a long list of rolls.

Origin and history

The loaf arrived with labor migration. The first Turkish guest workers in Schiedam were hired by the Vereenigde Glasfabrieken in September 1963, and the Schiedam museum records only 22 Turks holding a Dutch residence permit in 1960 against about 65,000 by 1973. Bakeries followed the families, opening in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Utrecht in the 1960s and 1970s, though the exact years go unrecorded. Muhittin Görden of Gorka Bakkerij in Amersfoort considers his shop the first in the country.

Wider sales came later. The bread has been sold across the Netherlands since the 1980s, and the filled versions followed on snack-bar menus, döner above all, listed under the same headings as the ordinary rolls.

The earliest dated image is a 1979 color slide by the photographer Robert de Hartogh, held in the Nederlands Fotomuseum's Migranten collection and shown on Het Geheugen. His own 2009 note calls the shop on the Zijstraat near the West-Kruiskade in Rotterdam the first Turkish bakery in the city. De Hartogh photographed a second Turkish bakery, on the 1e Middellandstraat, in 1987.