Simit: Istanbul's sesame bread ring, and how to buy it

Overview

Simit is a ring of bread, crunchy-crusted and chewy inside, its whole outside pressed thick with toasted sesame. Before baking, the ring is dipped in a thin wash of pekmez — grape molasses — which is what turns the crust that deep, glossy, reddish brown and gives the sesame something to cling to and something to taste of. It is the most ordinary food in the city and one of the most constant: sold from glass-fronted carts on nearly every busy corner, and from vendors carrying stacked trays balanced on the head, a simitçi threading through the ferry queues at dawn.

It is not Istanbul’s own invention, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. The simit belongs to Turkey at large and to the whole span of the old Ottoman world beyond it. In İzmir it is called gevrek and made thinner and crisper; there is a smaller, harder version in Ankara; and its close cousins run right across the region — the Greek koulouri, the ring breads of the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean are the same idea. Ottoman palace kitchen records mention it as far back as the sixteenth century, which makes it old, well-documented street food rather than a local speciality with a birthplace to defend.

What makes it worth an article anyway is that Istanbul is where you will meet it constantly, as the default street breakfast, and where the small decisions around it — with what, at what hour, from whom — actually reward knowing.

What to order

You ask for simit, and mostly you point. The single most useful thing to know is not a variant but a habit: simit is rarely eaten dry and alone. It is a vehicle, and the question is what goes with it.

The classic pairing is tea — çay, the small tulip glass that punctuates the whole day here — and the simit torn and dipped or eaten alongside. For something closer to a proper breakfast, the combinations worth asking for:

• with beyaz peynir — the white, brined sheep’s-milk cheese. A simit split and filled with it, sometimes with tomato and cucumber, is the standard cart-and-café breakfast and the thing to order if you want one item that stands in for a meal.
• with kaymak and honey — clotted cream and honey, a sweeter, richer take, more of a sit-down than a walking breakfast.
• plain, warm, from the morning batch — if the ring is genuinely fresh this needs nothing. The test is the sesame: a good simit sheds a little as you bite and tastes distinctly of it; the sesame is the flavour, not a decoration.

The reflex to resist is calling it a “Turkish bagel”. It is not boiled, it is not dense, and that expectation leads you to the wrong thing — a filled, heavy, café version sold to people who came looking for a bagel. A simit is lighter, crisper and built around sesame, not chew.

What to avoid

Very little here is a bad-baker problem; almost all of it is a freshness-and-setting problem, because the food is so cheap that the only way to sell it badly is to sell it stale or to sell the idea of it at a tourist price.

The freshness tell is the hour and the cart’s turnover. Simit is a morning bake. A cart by a ferry terminal or a market at eight in the morning is selling rings baked a couple of hours earlier; the same cart at four in the afternoon may be selling the ones that did not go. A fresh simit is faintly warm, chewy and fragrant with sesame; a stale one is dry, hard all the way through, and sheds sesame that has gone dusty rather than nutty. Buy where the stack is moving.

Be wary of the gimmick versions near the big sights. Chocolate-filled simit, simit “sandwiches” stuffed and wrapped and sold beside the major mosques and the Grand Bazaar at several times what a cart charges, exist for visitors who will not price-check. The thing itself costs almost nothing, so any simit priced like a café pastry has had its price set by how far you are from a cart, not by anything done to the bread.

Packaged supermarket simit is a different object — softer, evenly pale, made to sit on a shelf — and it is fine for what it is, but it is not the street thing and it is not why you would seek one out.

Practicalities

A simit from a cart is small change — think well under a euro, roughly €0.20 to €0.50 — which is exactly why it is the honest measure of a mispriced tourist stall: when the same ring is suddenly two or three euros in a filled-and-photographed version by a monument, the bread has not changed, the audience has. Carry coins; the carts and the tray vendors deal in cash and small notes, and this is precisely the kind of stall the city guide means when it says to keep cash for the ferries and the markets.

It is above all a morning food. The batch is baked early, the carts are busiest with the commuter and ferry crowd, and the natural way to eat one is standing — on the quay, on the boat across to Üsküdar, walking to wherever you are going — with a glass of tea bought from the same stretch of pavement. It is sold all day, but the afternoon simit is the leftover of the morning’s, and it shows.

There is no ritual to it and no wrong way to hold it, which is the point: it is the thing this city eats on the move, before the day has properly started, for the price of nothing.