Pastane Poğaçasi

Even though I like a piece of cake and even a slice of baklava for breakfast once in a while I strongly favor savory food over sweet for breakfast.

Nowadays I tend to skip breakfast at home and get a bite at my office desk because of the early starting office hours. I get a croissant, make porridge in the office or bring a toast with me to eat with cheese & tomato salad.

Back in the day when I used to live in Istanbul it was the same, mostly due to hours spend in the morning traffic jam, but I used to get a poğaça from “pastane” and have it with Turkish tea in the office.

Pastane is the little bakery shops or Pâtisseries that was there before Starbucks or the third wave coffee shops for lovers to meet, friend to get together and socialize. I remember vividly going to best pastane in the little town my grandparents lives with my cousin on our own at the age of 10. We used to order chocolate mouse called “Supangle” every year with our pocket money that we got from our grandparents while having giggles all the time we were at pastane.

I also remember the road from our apartment in Nisantasi (Istanbul) to the metro station lined up with so many beautiful pastanes.I used to pick a different one to get my breakfast on my way to the office. Each had a different bake I liked.

One of the bakes from these Pastane’s that I get is the poğaça, savoury pastry filled with mostly cheese and herbs or olives, potatoes, beef mince...

Now I bake poğaça at home but mostly the homemade kind that doesn’t have yeast in the pastry, which is also the more difficult type to get better results. But recently we have been feeling a bit nostalgic and wanted to have the old school pastane poğaça for breakfast. And so on a Sunday morning I googled and googled to find the quickest yeasted poğaça recipe that I can whip up quickly and found one on yemek.com then altered it to make the dough with my stand mixer and this is what I came up with in the end. I will be baking these again and tweaking the recipe to make it better, so watch this space. But here is what I have so far.

Yeasted Poğaça

Ingredients

7 cups plain flour 2 teaspoon dry instant yeast 2 tablespoon caster sugar 1 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 cup warm milk
1 cup warm water 2 egg (save 1 of the yolks for egg wash) 1 cup vegetable oil Filling - 100 gr crumbled feta mixed with 10 gr parsley chopped Topping - sesame seeds 1. Put the flour, yeast, sugar and salt into the bowl of a stand mixer and mix at slow speed. 2. Add the milk and water while continuing to mix at slow speed. 3. Add 1 egg and the egg white and vegetable oil and increase the speed of mixer to medium high and mix for 10 minutes. 4. Shape the dough in a ball and leave to rest 30 minutes. 5. In the meantime heat the oven to 180 fan. Lightly oil 3 baking trays. 6. Take a golf ball size piece from the dough and shape in a ball. Flatten the ball and put half a teaspoon cheese & herb mix in the center. Fold the dough from the center and push the edges together well with your fingers. Place on the baking tray and continue with the rest. 7. Brush the tops of the pogaça with the egg yolk you saved and sprinkle with sesame seeds. I placed 6 in a baking tray and ended up with total 16 pogaça in total. 8. Bake in the oven 20-25 minutes.

Serve with extra feta and simply sliced tomato, cucumber (drizzled with olive oil if you like) and of course Turkish tea.