As a local, pretty impressed with the listed items in Turkey!
Still, the rabbithole goes much deeper. I highly recommend The Turkish Cookbook by Musa Dağdeviren, a food anthropologist of sorts who spent his formative years traveling the country town by town and collecting recipes that were often condemned to be forgotten due to the modernization and globalization of food and food culture: often they'd be passed down generationally and not written down, rely on manual and work intensive or just plain unusual methods, have ingredients that are easy to acquire in a rural household but hard to acquire in a grocery store, have flavors that would be considered unusual by the global standards of the 70s-90s, etc. It's a truly massive and amazing collection.
It's my favorite cook book. I use it heavily. I pull recipes out of it to bring to parties and community events. I always get rave reviews and a million questions.
The funny thing is I'm an American feeding (mostly) Americans. Not only do I have to substitute ingredients but, for the most part, I've never ever tried the dishes prior to cooking them. None of us know how "it's supposed to taste".
I find it all pretty comical. He went and archived all of these rural Turkish recipes and now a bunch of people on a rural American island are attempting to replicate them. From where I stand, he nailed his goal.
You need to get the sugar cubes and use way too many for maximum authenticity :-) I myself am partial to Çaykur's Hemşin tea, by the way.
Mehmet Efendi is good if you're walking by the shop (smells amazing) but the dirty secret is that in a post specialty coffee world, you're probably better off asking your local coffee shop to grind fresh beans for you on the "Turkish" setting or absent that, the finest possible setting they have - more than espresso. And you get to have an interesting conversation with the baristas because they're always super psyched about it for some reason. Arabica beans, dark roast, low acidity from Ethiopia, Yemen etc is traditional but you shouldn't feel limited to that.
"With your agreement, we and our *830* partners use cookies or similar technologies" - this must be some joke I fail to understand. What an absurd number.
Just last week I came across a site that listed over 1500 "partners". I' wonder if anyone from that company can tell me who each of those is and what they are used for?
This is because you have one vendor who does a specific task (ie audience matching for a data management platform or third party audience vendor) and that vendor uses tens/hundreds of vendors to power their product. So you place a single 1x1 image pixel, but that can call one of many different scripts.
It so happens that we have Absurd on a special discount today. Only $19.99 or only $9.99 if you subscribe for a year. Normal price $79.99 so don't lose out on today's offer!
Data bug if anyone from World Food Atlas is reading this. I clicked on "tapas" and went to the recipe section where it says "Authentic Tortilla de Patata Recipe", and then underneath says "We strongly advise you to read the cooking tips before jumping to the recipe though". The cooking tips are all for a completely different dish, apparently one with shrimp and garlic, that have nothing to do with Tortilla de Patata.
If anyone’s looking for an assessment of data quality here, I can confirm that for a few small to mid-sized US cities I’ve lived in or am familiar with, this does a remarkable job of picking out dishes that are truly distinctive, locally considered one of “our things”, and generally pretty damn good if you like the sort of dish it is.
Huh, nothing on there, yeah, searching on DDG I see a few recipes mixed in with other dishes that share some words, no Wikipedia page, limited info about what’s up with it. Looks like a San Francisco thing, maybe?
This site has some great recipes. It's really too bad that they'll never float to the top of a search engine because they're missing the obligatory long-form blog post preamble.
An interesting thing you can do in Google Maps mobile app is go to a city and scroll down and you'll start seeing reviews of restaurants and places left by locals. For example, look up Zanzibar in Google Maps mobile and scroll up on the info view at the bottom (where it has the Directions/Save/Share buttons) to get to "Latest in Zanzibar".
By seeing the pictures and reviews you can get an idea for local dishes.
Those reviews are mostly tourists trying “local” dishes. I tried your method for Zanzibar and found reviews from “local” guides who were anywhere but from Zanzibar. And having visited Zanzibar before, those dishes aren’t really local either
I think, at least 10 years ago, it was some algorithm based on number of reviews you leave vs average number of reviews for the area.
For example, on a motorcycle trip across Vietnam in 2015, I left a review for a super isolated pho stand that for whatever reason had a google maps profile. I got an email a few hours later that I was a "Local Guide" for Đồng Hới. Cool! Only once I got home to Houston did I realize, I wasn't a "Local Guide" for Đồng Hới, I was just now and forever a "local guide" for everywhere on earth! All my reviews had "local guide" next to it and would get lots of little thumbs up things, all my images I submit to restaurants now get TONS of views, it's really quite silly!
Very helpful once I started my own restaurant and left a review for it though ;) or my friend's restaurants
I can confirm some of the Chinese dishes are on point, such as the dim sums like HarGow, ShuMai, Cheung fun.
I appreciate they don’t even bother with a recipe, and tell you where to eat it. This conforms with the Chinese eating culture: there are foods that should be left to restaurants.
Japanese and Chinese cuisine is often characterised by a split between home style and restaurant style cooking.
If you buy a recipe book or watch a cooking show from Japan or in China, you will see many recipes that are probably unrecognisable to westerners who did not grow up in an Asian household.
The split is mostly some ideology that certain foods are not worth the effort to recreate at home.
A lot of it is tool and stove constraints in a home kitchen versus restaurant kitchen (for example some fried noodle recipes require a hot stove).
The other is a belief that some skill is involved. Such as nigiri is not something made in a Japanese home, but eaten at a restaurant by a professional chef. To try at home would be a waste of ingredients, and a hubris of skill.
Nigiri are also a pain in the ass to make. In Japanese homes sushi usually means DIY temaki, which outsources the making process to the eaters, accounts for preferences in ingredients, wasabi strength etc and also ensures the nori stays crispy until the last second.
My father ran a Chinese restaurant for a few years and some dishes like dim sum we made at home only when we had every available family member pitching in assembly line style, we usually had recipes that called for enough filling to make X number of dim sum, where X was the number of rice paper dough wraps in a single package. People can eat a lot of dim sum and it's manual intensive labor. Some other things like stir frying doesn't work as well with most home ranges and one can only make one or two servings at a time, even though cooking time is very short. Even with the home made dim sum we took shortcuts besides using the pre made wraps, for the ones with barbecue pork fillings we bought the pork already cooked from the Chinese grocery.
It's probably some combination of equipment, ingredients or fixed time cost that only makes sense amortized over a large number of units.
I don't make fish and chips or deep-fried chicken at home. I know my kitchen will be smoky and greasy, and I'll have a ton of leftover oil.
Croissants, or their cousin puff pastry are a pain in the ass unless you're making a big batch to freeze or sell. Making a dozen buns in a batch is not so bad, but it's hardly worth the effort to make only a dozen croissants.
Paella tastes best made in a paella pan, and naan is best when it's hot from a tandoor oven. Who's going to keep all that gear around for the one time a year you make paella or naan?
Approximately nobody makes eg dim sum from scratch at home. Too many dishes, too many ingredients, very fiddly recipes, it's just not worth it when you can go out and get them from a restaurant that has specialized in dim sum for decades.
the eating format of dim sum also lends itself to not making it at home.
dim sum eating culture is around ordering many small plates to get a variety. any individual plate may have as few as three or four bite sized pieces on it. it is quite annoying for a family of four to make like twenty different dishes consisting of four bites each.
one for example is hand mincing; a fair amount of dim sum dishes are prepared by mincing meat using two cleavers, repeatedly, and sometimes kind of throwing it against a surface until it becomes springy in texture. there isn't really a mechanical equivalent for the home; a food processor completely makes the wrong texture, and so does buying pre-ground meat from the store.
dim sum is also similar to tapas where you are supposed to order a large variety of small dishes as a sort of feast. it is quite annoying for a family to make a dozen or twenty dishes consisting of four bites each.
It's all well-and-good to know about local cuisine, but sourcing them affordably and easily in other areas of the world is the key gotcha.
Middle America has greatly improved over the past 20 years in international ingredient availability. It used to be impossible to find organic vegetables or tahini (fresh or canned) in middle America, but this is no longer the case. One notable regression is with Whole Foods that doesn't carry any SKUs of pita bread in their flagship headquarters location, while H-E-B contains far more variety of SKUs (not everything WH carries), exceptional customer service, and lower prices.
The icon for Quad Cities pizza is off by 100 miles or more. Quad Cities is right in the tip of the bend on the Iowa east side/Illinois west side. It is remarkably local. Can't go giving BFE Iowa credit for something they had nothing to do with.
I had an idea for a food recommendation website that gets tips from food bloggers/local celebrities. Any ideas on how taste atlas is getting their data? It can't all just be manually entered from wikipedia or something can it?
Can go anywhere in the world - instantly zooms into my own city, heh. Reminds me of first time testing Google Earth. Watching my own back yard in bad resolution was somehow more exciting than exploring the world.
As a resident of Western Australia, it's disappointing that the Conti roll is the main recognisable thing we have centred on Perth. And I've never seen or heard of a hamdog.
We have a vibrant food scene here, from food trucks representing a lot of international food types to some pretty excellent restaurants serving local produce. But I guess there are few unique Western Australian dishes. We are, slowly, embracing more native plants and fruits in cuisine, though it's always seemed a massive oversight to me - it's a vast land with many edible plants but we largely ignore them in favour of the same stuff you can get in the UK and US. We are starting to see things like saltbush, pepperberry, warrigal greens, finger limes, quandong etc, showing up in some places, with interest slowly growing in the richness and possibilities of "Bush Tucker".
It does feel a bit odd having whole-Australian things like "Sausage Sizzle" on one city, Sydney. Or "Crocodile meat" centred on Canberra. Yeah it's the capital, but there aren't any crocs within 1000km of there that aren't in a zoo.
Note on the site - it's hard to hit the little numbers to expand the foods in any one place. They seem to highlight when the pointer is significantly below the target.
I guess you can’t claim many of them originated here though!
(Writing this at the chippy while waiting for my fish and chips to be cooked. Perth fish and chips are great, though this Brit would love it if there were mushy peas on offer in a few more of them!)
Mushy peas? Go Home! :) I think you mean pickled onions and carrots. EDIT: Edit and DIM SIM and Pineapple Fritter for dessert.
Yeah, I think the most important missing ingredient in fish and chips anywhere else in the world is the beach sunset and the freo doctor .. these two ingredients are essential to proper fish and chips, eh? :)
Slightly upsetting that at maximum zoom, the bubble over London claims 218 more dishes lay hidden behind Fish and Chips, but on clicking that only about 36 load...
Great idea, needs better scaling for larger data sets
Not to be that guy, but search “Seattle teriyaki history” and you will probably change your opinion on whether it belongs on this map. I’d also say that Cougar Gold cheese should be on the Washington map, and that huckleberry anything is more associated with Oregon than Idaho. I’m also dumbfounded that there isn’t a Toronto entry for peameal bacon sandwiches, and that the tenderloin sandwich isn’t an entry for the old Czech town of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. So - map is a good start but has a long way to go.
Wow the tenderloin sandwich is amazing! In Czechia it's kinda traditional that if a family have some longer travel ahead of them that they will prepare pork schnitzels with pickles in a bun or bread. The meme is kids going on a field trip and everybody unpacking their schnitzel sandwiches and eating them before the bus even leaves the home town.
It's funny that this dish transferred all the way to USA and remained a community staple.
Maybe they’ve been added since you looked, but there are two Beecher’s-related cheeses listed for Seattle [1][2]. You have to click the number next to the Seattle dog to see the complete list of dishes that includes them.
And not to pile on, but the Seattle dog is definitely popular and somewhat ubiquitous to the point it’s common to find cream cheese next to the other condiments at backyard barbecues.
I haven’t but it’s pretty interesting and now want to try one. Beecher cheese is called out but I’m not sure that it’s a “what is good to eat in seattle” but what is “food originating from seattle” - so fish and chips and teriyaki wouldn’t qualify ?
food is probably a very difficult concept for an atlas but i'll nitpick anyway: when i zoom in on Brest, France i find "cotriade" (never heard of that) but according to the french wikipedia it is a dish from Morbihan (so not Brest)
Still, the rabbithole goes much deeper. I highly recommend The Turkish Cookbook by Musa Dağdeviren, a food anthropologist of sorts who spent his formative years traveling the country town by town and collecting recipes that were often condemned to be forgotten due to the modernization and globalization of food and food culture: often they'd be passed down generationally and not written down, rely on manual and work intensive or just plain unusual methods, have ingredients that are easy to acquire in a rural household but hard to acquire in a grocery store, have flavors that would be considered unusual by the global standards of the 70s-90s, etc. It's a truly massive and amazing collection.