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Tavuk Göğsü

Istanbul

🇹🇷 Turkey Desserts medium 30 min (plus 4 hr soaking and 4 hr chilling) prep · 45 min cook serves 6 9 hr start to table ~350 kcal per serving surprise

Istanbul's most famous milk pudding has shredded chicken breast folded through it. It sits in dessert-shop windows next to the baklava, dusted with cinnamon, and nobody there finds this strange.

Boiled, soaked, and rinsed until it carries no taste at all, the chicken contributes texture, not flavor. Its fine fibers give the pudding a stretchy, faintly chewy body that starch alone cannot manage, closer to a set mozzarella cream than to anything meaty. Milk, sugar, and piney mastic do all the actual flavor work.

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The story

Tavuk göğsü, literally chicken breast, was served to Ottoman sultans in the kitchens of Topkapı Palace, where it counted as refined luxury. It is a clear relative of medieval Europe's blancmange, the chicken-and-milk white dish that turns up in The Canterbury Tales. Its deeper origins are argued over: the romantic version traces it to Roman and Byzantine cooking, but no surviving Roman source contains such a recipe, and current scholarship leans toward medieval Arab kitchens, where tenth-century cooks were already simmering shredded chicken with milk and ground rice.

Today it is everyday food, sold by the slab in muhallebici, the pudding shops found all over Istanbul and the rest of Turkey, eaten year-round and especially popular during Ramadan and family celebrations. Its even more beloved sibling is kazandibi, the same pudding deliberately scorched on the bottom until caramelized.

Fair warning: Even perfectly rinsed, the faint chew of chicken fibers is exactly what divides people, and a lazily rinsed version tastes like sweet chicken soup.
The recipe

Ingredients

  • 100 g (about half a small) skinless chicken breastthe fresher the better; the fibers separate more cleanly
  • 1 litre (4 cups) whole milk
  • 80 g (2/3 cup) rice flour
  • 40 g (1/3 cup) cornstarch
  • 200 g (1 cup) sugar
  • 1 tbsp butterplus a little for the dish
  • 2 small pieces mastic gumcrushed with a pinch of sugar; optional but distinctive
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract or pasteoptional
  • for dusting ground cinnamondo not skip it

Method

  1. Simmer the chicken in plain unsalted water for about 15 minutes, until cooked through.
  2. While still warm, tear it along the grain into strips, cover with cold water, and soak in the fridge for at least 4 hours or overnight.
  3. Drain the chicken and shred it into the finest threads you can manage, almost floss.
  4. Rinse the fibers in 5 to 7 changes of cold water, squeezing between changes, until the water runs clear and the fibers smell of nothing, then squeeze them firmly dry.
  5. Whisk the rice flour and cornstarch with 250 ml of the cold milk into a lump-free slurry.
  6. Bring the remaining milk and the sugar to a gentle boil in a heavy pot.
  7. Whisk in the slurry and cook over medium-low heat, stirring constantly, for 10 to 15 minutes, until it becomes a thick custard that holds a trail.
  8. Add the chicken fibers and keep cooking and stirring for about 10 minutes more so they disperse invisibly through the pudding.
  9. Off the heat, beat in the butter, crushed mastic, and vanilla, then keep beating hard for a minute or two, or pulse briefly with an immersion blender, to develop a smooth, elastic texture.
  10. Pour into a lightly buttered dish to a depth of about 3 cm, cool to room temperature, then refrigerate for at least 4 hours.
  11. Cut into squares, roll each into a cylinder if you want the classic shop presentation, dust generously with cinnamon, and serve cold.
Shopping notes
Mastic gum is sold in tiny packets at Turkish, Greek, and Middle Eastern groceries and online; the pudding survives fine without it. Rice flour is in the baking or gluten-free aisle of any large supermarket.
Cross-checked against: cookingorgeous.com · en.wikipedia.org
Kitchen notes

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