Kurutma (Drying)

In delicatessens called şarküteri all over Turkey, you’ll see red tubes that look like salami and red slabs that look like leather hanging from hooks. The sausage is called sucuk, spiced beef inside a lamb intestine, and the leather is a marinated beef fillet called pastırma.

The word pastırma (adapted to basturma in Greece and pastrami in New York) simply means ‘pressed’, but that reveals nothing of the long and complex process of drying and coating in paste that produces Turkey’s ubiquitous answer to prosciutto.