Here’s a confession: I’m a serious foodie. I mean, I am a world-class eater. I don’t know how people become food critics, but I will tell you this, it’s one of my secret dream jobs.

Navigating my way through a whole new cuisine was one of the most exciting prospects of relocating to Turkey. There weren’t many Turkish restaurants in the places that I lived and to be honest with you, I’m not sure I would have made a point to seek any out, not having heard anything about it over the years.

But I came, I ate and I conquered. In fact, my earliest vocabulary words were all food terms. I was making my way through menus in Turkish fairly early on in the game. I let my stomach do the learning.

I could see how Turkish desserts might be a bit intimidating for foreign tourists. After all, if they look up tavuk göğsü in their little pocket dictionaries, it will say chicken breast. But it looks like a wad of rolled up pudding. In fact, it is kind of both. It is a rolled up pudding that is made with finely-shredded chicken breast. And you may be asking yourself: “Ewwww. Why?” The answer is simple. It’s a village solution. When shredded and boiled down, it becomes a natural thickener. The end result is an incredibly dense, even chewy pudding that does not taste remotely of chicken. Still, the thought may scare people away.

Chicken breast is just one of many lovely milk-based desserts we have here. In fact, we have a chain called Hasan Üsta and their specialties are süt tatlılar, or milk desserts. Some less disturbing examples of these would be sütlaç, a perfectly innocent rice pudding, keşkül (my personal favorite), a pudding made from almond milk, muhallebi, a pudding made from gum mastic; a most unusual flavor unique to the Mediterranean region. Incidentally, this mastic gum is also what gives Turkish ice cream (dondurma) its distinctive taffy-like texture.
There’s also kazandibi, which looks incredibly like chicken breast except there is a dark brown layer around the outside. Kazandibi means “bottom of the pan” and it got its name by looking like what you scrape off the bottom of the pan. Again, it sounds less than appetizing and I wish it were. I could log less hours on the treadmill were it the case.

You are no doubt already aware of the evil that is baklava. Soaking doughy desserts in syrup is almost an obsession here in Turkey. There are two desserts, lokma (which means “bite”) and tulumba which are essentially just deep-fried dough soaked in syrup. Lokma are often sprinkled with cinnamon and then eaten profusely by yours truly.

Even poor innocent fruit does not escape the syrup-soaking. One of my favorite desserts here is ayva tatlısı, which means quince dessert. It is quince that is boiled with sweet syrup and cloves. To make matters worse, it is often dolloped with a slab of kaymak, which is like whipped cream on steroids. It’s more like clotted cream which is fitting considering what it is doing to ones arteries. Kaymak is liberally applied to syrup-soaked treats, upping the heart attack ante.

Perhaps the most perplexing Turkish dessert of all is aşure. I think a love of aşure is proof that you just might make it here after all. Aşure is also called Noah’s Pudding and here’s the story behind that. It is said that when Noah came to rest at the foot of Mt. Ararat here in Northeastern Turkey, they emptied all of their left-over provisions, cooked ‘em up and served them as a pudding. Aşure is like an “everything but the kitchen sink” kind of affair. It has many regional variations, but typically you will find cracked wheat, rice, beans, chick peas, dried fruits and nuts and sometimes orange and lemon peels. It is then topped with pomegranate seeds. I sometimes order it when I don’t want to feel guilty about ordering dessert. After all, it is full of protein and legumes and what have you. It is not for the timid, aşure. But if you just eat it and try not to think about what’s actually in it, you will probably enjoy the experience a lot more.

If we’ve covered the most perplexing of the Turkish desserts, let me share with you now the most insane. That prize belongs to künefe. Künefe is essentially dough that has been disguised to look like shredded wheat that is made quesadilla-style with cheese in between. The concoction is then deep-fried and (can you finish the sentence?)….soaked in syrup and…….(yes!) topped with kaymak.

The only time that I ever felt guiltier about a dessert was the time I showed up at a fair to meet up with friends. I was milling about the food stalls when I spied, “Deep-Fried Oreos”. These people were dipping giant Oreo cookies in funnel-cake batter and deep-frying them! They were closing the stall down and she looked my way and said, “I’ve got a few left if you want ‘em.” My friends had been yelling for me for almost five minutes and I was so comatized by that trash food that I was oblivious to their calls. Künefe puts me in a similar dream state and I always feel so dirty afterwards.

What else can you ask for in a dessert, eh?