Daily Slice gives a quick snapshot each weekday of a different slice or pie that the folks at the Serious Eats empire have enjoyed lately.
[Photo: Carey Jones]
Take an oven-hot pepperoni pizza, but with the edges folded over into a boat-like shape, and the pepperoni swapped out for garlicky, cumin-y sucuk. What you have is a most excellent pide at Şimşek Pide Salonu, one of many fantastic recommendations from the good folks at Istanbul Eats.
Two different pizzalike foodstuffs are popular in Turkey, the puffy-crusted pide, which comes in several shapes, and the much thinner, much crisper lahmacun (more on that to come). You'll see plenty of inferior pide around Istanbul, some of them looking as if they were baked yesterday, others so flat they might have been squished in transit. But at Şimşek Pide Salonu, they're baked to order. The crust emerges an even brown, crisp on the outside, steaming and stretchy in the center, oozing with melted cheese and sausage oils. The final touch? A baste of melted butter. Little bits of it pool on the sides of the platter, all the better for dragging the crusty ends into. And any type of pide can be ordered with an egg on top.
They're just about sized for a single (hungry) person. If you get them to go, you get what looks just like an American pizza box, but, of course, long and skinny. This guy passed an important pizza test, too: the leftovers were taken home, kept overnight, and served as a very welcome breakfast the next morning, refrigerator-cold though they were.
Şimşek Pide Salonu
Taksim Caddesi 2/A, Taksim, Istanbul (map)
+90 212 249 4642
simsekpidesalonu.com