“‘Dil Peyniri is good to eat with your fingers. It’s mild and you pull it into strings and wrap the strings around a green pickled tomato and pop it in your mouth'”

Jason Goodwin, The Baklava Club

As I’ve already mentioned, I am in Turkey this month, and I must say, enjoying the breakfasts here.

Most on offer is fairly straightforward – the waiter approaches with a huge tray of small dishes of cucumber, salmon, feta, olives, tomatoes…. many things to eat with the delicious freshly baked selection of bread and rolls (covered with toasted sesame seeds – wonderful). Included is a kind of stringy-looking cheese – quite mild so perfect for the early morning.

What is dil peyniri?

This is a fresh cheese made with cows’ milk whose Turkish name is Dil Peyniri (pronounced ‘deal-pay-near-E’). It’s widely available in supermarkets all over the country, often in log form when packaged and subsequently split into its stringy form by the purchaser, but it’s much better bought unpackaged, completely fresh, slightly wet.  It’s the fresh cheese which develops in the first stage of the production of Kaşar cheese (but while the curd is being boiled it’s stretched and becomes fibrous like Mozzarella instead of being put into a mould). Dil Peyniri becomes even stringier when heated which is why Kaşar is preferred for pizzas.

In the UK you can buy Dil Peyniri at:

• Marketurk
• Turkishop
• Turkish Porter