Calis Beach and Fethiye Turkey Discussion Forum
Turkey Related Subjects => Recipes & Turkish Cooking Section => Topic started by: Colwyn on January 01, 2012, 14:51:29 PM
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Can anyone supply the name of the nuts of the following description?
The shells are about the same length as pistaccios but lighter in colour and much thinner, no more than an ordinary postal envelop in thickness. Turks eat them by placing the whole nuts vertically between their teeth and squeezing until the shell cracks allowing access to a tiny white sliver of kernel. (I find it impossible to do this cleaner and end up with fragments of nut and kernel all over the place. Perhaps you have to begin as a child and practice it every day until adulthood in oerder to become proficient). Once liberated the kernel is so small and with such little taste that you wonder what the hell was the purpose of expending all that effort. They are probably considered "a delicacy" which is the usual excuse reason for such things.
Any ideas?
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Do you mean these:
(http://www.mijnalbum.nl/Foto-3KEYNWYR-D.jpg)
They are called kabak çekirdegi.
edit: English translation is pumpkin seeds.
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7 minutes from question to answer - pretty good service!
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Thanks Dutchie, not nuts at all then.
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Indeed no nuts but definitely tasteless ;)
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Maybe it is like celery - healthy because it takes more calories to eat/digest than it contains.
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But at least celery doesn't taste like cardboard.
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No, it tastes of ponds :D
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The reason I wanted to find out about what turn out to be pumpkin seeds goes back some time - to when I was a teenager.
I met an Iranian Kurd who introduced me to pistachios that he had brought from his homeland. He told me that they were eaten by prostitutes sitting in the streets outside their houses when they were waiting for clients to take an interest. You could always tell their chairs, he said, even when the prostitute wasn't there, because of the pile of shells underneath. And the reason they ate these nuts? Because they took more calories to open than the calories they contained, so the prostitutes could snack all day (or possibly night) and not put on weight.
This story didn't make sense to me since pistachios are not very difficult to open and they are probably full of calories. But, pumpkin seeds would seem to fit the bill entirely. So Scunner may well be right in his supposition. I shan't enquire how he happened to come by this knowledge.
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Don't forget that once you've mastered the art of eating them, you've then got to master the art of just dropping the shells all around you. You lose points for putting them in a bin, ashtray etc.