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Tencere (Stewing)
Appears in
By David Dale and Somer Sivrioglu
Published 2015
Turks don’t make stocks or reductions for storage. We simmer whatever meat we need on the day we’re going to eat it, and boil the accompanying rice in that water when the meat is removed. We might make a second dish from the leftovers, but essentially it’s all consumed within 24 hours.
But we do love slow cooking. The tradition of güveç (clay pot) cooking started in rural households, which would have a fire pit outside the house—a hole in the ground called a tandır. You would light a fire in the bottom and hang a clay pot over the fire, slowly simmering a mixture of any ingredients you could find. If you could afford it, you would line the sides of the pit with clay, and bake dough on the hot sides, making a loaf that was called nan in Ottoman.