Name: Midye dolma review by Yehanoha at Midyeci Zeynep, Kaş/Antalya, Türkiye
Item: Midye dolma
Rating: 4.4
Author: Yehanoha

Mussels in the shell, stuffed with spiced rice, steamed shut and sold cold from a tray on the street, eaten one after another with a squeeze of lemon and counted by the empty shells: midye dolma is Istanbul's signature street food and one of the oldest. Armenian and Greek cooks of the city made it in the Ottoman period, and the rice filling, with onion, pine nuts, currants, allspice and cinnamon, belongs to the same family as the stuffed vine leaves and vegetables called zeytinyağlı dolma. Today the trade is run largely by families from Mardin in the south-east, who prepare thousands a day for the sellers who stand with their trays at Beşiktaş, Kadıköy, Taksim and İzmir's Kordon. The seller opens each shell with a thumb, squeezes lemon over it, and uses the top shell as a spoon to hand it to you.

Fresh black mussels are scrubbed, bearded and prised slightly open with a knife without separating the halves, and the meat is left attached. The filling is a pilaf started in olive oil: finely chopped onion cooked soft, short-grain rice stirred in with pine nuts and currants, seasoned with black pepper, allspice, cinnamon, a little sugar and salt, and cooked for a few minutes with a little water so it is half done. Each mussel is packed with a spoonful of this rice and closed, then the mussels are stacked tightly in a wide pot with a weighted plate on top, water is added partway up, and they steam for thirty to forty minutes until the rice has swelled and the shells are glued shut by it. They cool in the pot and are served at room temperature or cold, never hot. A good tray is made that morning and finished by evening.

Judge by the mussel first: it should be plump, tender and taste of the sea, not shrunken, rubbery or fishy. The rice should be fully cooked, moist from the mussel liquor and oil, and clearly spiced with cinnamon and allspice, with currants and pine nuts actually present rather than implied. Mark down dry or undercooked rice, a filling that tastes mainly of oil or of stale spice, mussels so small the rice is all you taste, shells that smell at all of ammonia, and any dolma that has been sitting in the sun. The lemon should be fresh, squeezed per mussel, not poured from a bottle. Eating a dozen is normal; the test of a seller is whether the tenth is as good as the first. Frozen, factory-stuffed versions reheated in a restaurant are a different and lesser product, usually betrayed by uniform size and pale rice.

Midye dolma

Türkiye

Midyeci Zeynep

Gerçekten baska bir seviyede, midyeler oldukça taze ve diri. Midye boyutları ne aşırı büyük ne cok kücük, baharat seviyesi cok dengeli, pilavı yerinde pişmiş. Bayıldım

Midye dolma review by Yehanoha at Midyeci Zeynep, Kaş/Antalya, Türkiye

Midye dolma

Midyeci Zeynep

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