Seasonal Food in Turkey – Hurma

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As it’s Sunday, we’ve again partaken in our second favourite pastime (after sitting in bars) of going to the market.

As part of ‘Seasonal Food in Turkey,’ our intention was to try and keep with the festive theme and take some photos of the dreaded Brussels sprouts.

They’ve been around on the market for the last three weeks or so but not today. There’s a sprout drought!

Could it be the bad weather we’ve had this week?

We don’t know, but Christmas just won’t be Christmas if I can’t force feed ourselves a couple of sprouts. We’ve got one last chance at Fethiye market next Tuesday.

Anyway, as there were no sprouts, I took a photo of these things instead – equally as traumatic as the sprout in our opinion.

For years, we’ve looked at these on the markets around Fethiye and wondered what they are – our sheltered life in evidence again I think, but then Wigan’s two fruit and veg stalls probably didn’t see much of a market for them.

The problem with trying to find out the English translations of weird and wonderful fruit and vegetables in Fethiye is that the stall holders, and everyone else for that matter, seem to have their own names for everything.

The most common word we’ve seen on the market translates as ‘date.’ No, not having that one.

Whilst at a Turkish friend’s house a couple of weeks ago, we asked about it. ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘this is a Franka Elması.’ Some sort of apple.

Not having that one either.

This same Turkish friend then cut some up and insisted we try it. It’s his favourite fruit and he was wolfing them down.

We’d been curious for ages and love trying new foods but both of us can safely say that our curiosity is now more than satisfied and we shan’t be trying them again.

It’s easy to see why they’re popular here.

Turks generally have a very sweet tooth and that was the sweetest, oddest textured food that ever passed my not very sweet teeth. It made my teeth tingle.

If you’ve never had them and you like sweet things, give them a go because you’ll probably love them.

Oh, and we hit the jackpot last week.

One of the stalls named this fruit as ‘hurma’. We mumbled it to ourselves all the way back home then we didn’t forget and opened the dictionary.

At last! These big orange tomato looking things are persimmons.

Wiki tells me they’re very popular in Japan, as well. See, you start writing a blog and you become a mine of useless information…

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