Tavuk Gögsü: 1st Edition

For Turko, the Valentine's day present was supposed to be his favorite Turkish dessert. He raved about the smooth creaminess of tavuk gogsu, a vanilla pudding with bits of sliver-fine shredded chicken. So, sneaky girl that I am, I found out how to spell it, then typed it up while he wasn't looking and saved it. A few weeks later, the holiday was the perfect time to pull this trick out of my sleeve. But where to start?

This website was one of the first I found on the subject. Apparently, this dish was high society back in medieval Europe. The Turks probably adopted it from them around that time and made a few changes along the way. However, at the bottom of the page, after she painstakingly went through the whole recipe, she actually warned you away from making it, saying it was too foreign for modern tastes. Well, that's a bit fershwunkedy in my book.

So I moved on to two other sites and a youtube video. All of them are modern Turkish recipes, so I figured why not? I picked up some rice flour from the local asian grocery, mixed a few of the recipes together and tried to go with it.

So here was the setup:



And my tenuous butter with cooked flour debacle that started the ultimate clumpiness.





And some shredded chicken for the bottom.



Now, while it tasted good, it was very runny. And clumpy. Plus I added way too much chicken. It looked pretty before I stuck it in the fridge though. Did it set? No. Not at all. Even a bit. Nope. I was highly dissapointed considering it was going so well flavor-wise before the whole not turning into pudding part. This post is really the longest (and most illustrated) way possible to say this: If you don't know what you're doing, maybe you shouldn't mess with the recipes. You know, just for now.



Verdict: It tastes good for sweet chicken soup. But it's soup. Not pudding.