
The story behind Turkish Delight - diminish
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20181003-the-secret-story-behind-turkish-delight
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manorie
It is not easy to do it well, only ~5% of producers making it really enjoyable
I can say. As a Turkish foodie with a Chef wife, Turkish Delight is not
something we consume regularly. Unless it is very well done like the ones Haci
Bekir produce. It's just a companion to Turkish Cofee most of the time. It's
very easy to make a bad Turkish Delight. On 90% of my tastings, I don't even
finish it, but Haci Bekir and some other shops are making it perfect which you
do eat without coffee also.

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vincentmarle
I have the same thing with baklava, 90% doesn’t taste good but you always keep
looking for the 10% that does. Whenever baklava is on the menu, I _need_ to
try it, but none of the fancy restaurants I’ve been to in the US do it really
well (the $4 per piece ones), but the cheap corner store on Post & Powell in
SF surprisingly has one of the best (and they get it from some bakery in
Oakland but refuse to tell me which one).

~~~
Broken_Hippo
I have the fotunate/unfortunate experience of growing up eating home-made
baklava. I grew up going to an Eastern Orthodox church and most of the
congregation was either immigrants or descendants of immigrants (including
myself, great-grandmother was from Syria, along with some of my grandmother's
siblings. My grandmother happened to be born in the US).

I used to find most of it disappointing at best. My tastes have loosened up
quite a bit since then because not only did I give up church, but I'm far
removed from the area now.

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RightMillennial
Are you saying the home-made baklava was usually disappointing or the bought
baklava was? The middle eastern ladies at my Orthodox parish make delicious
baklawa.

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Broken_Hippo
The store-bought always was disappointing - the home-made stuff was always
wonderful.

Their cookies, however, were not. Anise... blech. :D

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modernerd
Maybe I've not had great Turkish Delight, but my reaction to it was the same
as this person's:

“I tried Turkish Delight and it was good but not ‘sell out my family to the
White Witch‘ good.”

Source:
[https://twitter.com/missmfair/status/585582845554532353](https://twitter.com/missmfair/status/585582845554532353)

Ref: [https://www.tor.com/2016/08/08/why-was-turkish-delight-
the-u...](https://www.tor.com/2016/08/08/why-was-turkish-delight-the-ultimate-
temptation-in-c-s-lewis-narnia/)

~~~
orev
Given the “old world” nature of it, I have to think that it’s one of those
things that was really amazing at the time, but just can’t compare to modern
sweets, so you can’t really get a good perspective on it. Like if you had
watched a movie like Guardians of the Galaxy before ever seeing Star Wars,
you’d wonder what the big deal was about Star Wars.

~~~
jschwartzi
In the same token there are a lot of modern sweets that I find to be overly
sweet. For example a lot of the Starbucks sweet coffee drinks are so sweet
that they make me gag.

I find most modern sweet things to be disgustingly sweet, but Turkish Delight
is one of the few sweets that I really like because it's not overwhelmingly
sweet.

~~~
HBlix
Starbucks coffee drinks are to me what I’d imagine it would be like to gargle
a sheet cake. Not just sweet, but cloying, and very fatty.

~~~
jschwartzi
Frequently they'll take something that I like and add a couple of pumps of
vanilla to it, then discontinue the original recipe.

There was a cold brew with sweet cream that they had last year which was a
really good cold drink that wasn't overly sweet. So this year they replace it
with a cold brew with vanilla sweet cream and now it has two pumps of vanilla
syrup in it in addition to the sweetness of the sweet cream. So now it's
disgustingly sweet and tastes cloyingly of vanilla.

I pretty much only get lattes and drip coffee there now.

~~~
setr
You can just ask them not to put in the vanilla; starbucks is impressively
malleable, and removing a syrup is likely barely on their complexity meter,
given the hyper-specific orders I’ve seen people give

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crooked-v
C. S. Lewis's greatest crime was tricking innumerable children into thinking
they'd like Turkish Delight.

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aoki
As a kid growing up in the US, I liked “Aplets and Cotlets” a lot, so I could
really empathize with Edmund. I suppose that if my parents had given us rose
or bergamot lokum it would have been a very different story.

~~~
samatman
It's funny, I adore rosewater and pine Turkish Delight, but think of Aplets
and Cotlets as that weird, bad candy that comes with your rations in the Boy
Scouts.

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Jolter
So did anyone manage to glean what the "secret story" was?

~~~
Loughla
A way to get people to click on the article based solely on the title. Like a
kind of bait to drive clicks. Weird.

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Graham24
being English, every Christmas there was always a box of Turkish Delight on
the table (and dates of course).

~~~
jschwartzi
I love dates, especially ones that have not been pitted because they retain a
lot more softness. Pitted dates are an abomination.

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Celarnor
For a good ten years or so, I thought Turkish Delight was a fictitious candy
brand C.S. Lewis made up for the Narnia books.

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asdr
Putting all aside, I don't know who came up with but what a terrible name for
a dessert; and why do you change its original name in the first place?

