The Sweet Taste of Eğirdir

It didn’t look very different from any other pide I’d eaten over the years actually. Perhaps the dough was a little thinner, more like that of a lahmacun than a normal pizza. Perhaps the cheese was a little less obvious. But of course there was a curious shimmer to it.

This was, you see, that weird sweet and sour confection that has been Eğirdir’s gift to world cuisine – the peynirli şekerli pide (sugared cheese pide).

I’d tried it once before many years ago and the flavour hadn’t left any lasting impression. So when I returned to Eğirdir and was wandering the windy back streets in vague search of what I remembered as a small, rather dingy restaurant I suspect that in my heart of hearts I expected it to have shut its doors long ago which perhaps explains why I didn’t find it.

“Can you still get sugared pide here?” I asked my hotelier, İbo, in the morning. 

“Of course!” he said. “Where you had it last time.”

Horrified, I rushed back out again in search of the restaurant and, yes, sure enough, there it was: Hacı Alaadin’s Pide Salonu but still with the peynirli şekerli pide listed on its menu. Last on the list which is where perhaps it deserved to be. 

I tried. Really, I did, even though it was only 11.30 in the morning. But some things just aren’t meant to be sweet and, according to the judgement of my tastebuds, pide is definitely one of those things. It felt to me as if someone had accidentally sprinkled sugar on the dough instead of salt, and, who knows, perhaps that’s how the whole crazy idea started. 

But for all you culinary anthropologists out there you’ll find the shop in the labyrinth of narrow shopping streets between the Dundar Bey Medresesi and the walls of Eğirdir’s old castle.