The Other Hummus
The Other Hummus
Bakla in Antakya
The Turkish city of Antakya is famous for hummus, but its bakla is better. Bakla is made with a local variety of fava-like beans—bakla—instead of chickpeas, and in addition to lemon and tahini usually contains a considerable amount of garlic. Served on a small plate, bakla is less thick than hummus, but also heavier. It is almost purple in color and usually served warm from the vigor with which the beans were just mashed.
The same men who sell hummus also sell bakla. Both are made in the same one-room storefronts, to order, with wooden mallets. There’s Adnan’s, near the Catholic Church in the old city, and another whose name I forget near the Saray Hotel and the Liverburger.
Bakla is not a breakfast food per se. Some feel it sets in your stomach like concrete. But I liked to have it at the start of the day for fear I wouldn’t get another chance. Antakya’s region is also famous for kagit kebabs and harbiye durums and salt-baked chicken and kunife and its residents are tirelessly hospitable, so its safest to start with bakla.
Antakya is located 12 miles from the border with Syria, which, more than any of these dishes, has put the city in the news over the past several years. One morning in 2013, I was asked if I wanted my bakla mashed or not. No one I talked to later could remember ever having been asked this before. Unmashed bakla would just be a plate of beans. Maybe, someone suggested, the store own was simply trying to accommodate a foreigner: Antakya was full of Syrian refugees, he explained, and in Syria people prefer to eat their beans whole.
Bakla, like hummus, is served with a variety of garnishes, including onions, mint, peppers, pickles, and pickled peppers. Sometimes pickled carrots or pickled cabbage, too. One morning there were also pickled turnips. The owner explained their pickled turnips were usually white, but these, deep red, were imported from Israel: Some people said they were watered with the blood of Palestinian children, but he thought it was probably just a GMO thing. I appreciated his open-mindedness, though he may just have been trying to reassure a customer.
Other parts of the world have good hummus, but I’ve never found good bakla outside of Antakya. Short of space in my luggage, I once bought a gray, three-dollar gym bag so I could carry several pounds of it, sealed in thin plastic sleeves, back to Istanbul with me. The bag arrived tattered and empty, having burst apart at the seams during the trip.