Guests from abroad are picked up at 9:30 a.m. from their hotels or at the cruise-ship port for a welcoming tea with your host and your culinary guide.

We drive to the farmers’ market to shop for the ingredients of your lunch, which will be comprised of three cold starters, one warm entrée and a main course. At the market you will encounter local food purveyors who offer all manner of self-harvested olives, wild seasonal greens, vegetables, as well as home-made noodles, jams, pickles, breads and a delicious array of cheeses.

From the market we will drive you the short distance to Ortakent, Yarbasan Stone Houses, a nominee for the Aga Khan prize this year. This a collection of hilltop, fully modern homes with panoramic views. They are built of stone in the fashion of ancient Halicarnassus, and connected to each other with cobblestone streets and stairs.

www.yarbasanevleri.com

At the heart of this village, at the juncture of the Aegean Sea and the surrounding mountains, is Erenler Sofrasi, an oasis of civility and fine taste.

Here we will guide you through the delicious secrets of regional Aegean cookery with its accent on olive oil and fresh herbs, a very special and particularly healthy branch of Turkish cuisine. You will be invited to watch the cooking sessions while sipping a glass of wine, or join-in for a hands-on experience if you’d rather. Either way, we guarantee you we will be entertained and with the help of the written recipes we will offer you, be able to recreate the feast back at home.

We will serve you a lunch of all the wonderful dishes we have cooked at tables that look out at the Aegean, the most mythological of all seas.

At 2:30 p.m. we will drive you back to your chosen location in Bodrum, giving you ample time to visit the charming town and its phantasy-laden Crusaders’ Castle with its world-famous Underwater Museum.

* This event can be arranged only on Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays when different area markets operate.

Please contact us for availability and prices.

Reservations +90 (532) 248-2479
e-mail: sofra@erenler-sofrasi.com

Day 1 (Tuesday):We will greet you upon arrival in Bodrum and take you to Yarbasan, where you will be staying in one of our Holiday Houses. This fairy-tale like complex, a nominee for the Aga Khan prize this year, is a collection of hilltop, fully modern homes with panoramic views. They are built of stone in the fashion of ancient Halicarnassus, and connected to each other with cobblestone streets and stairs. www.yarbasanevleri.com
At the heart of this village, at the juncture of the Aegean Sea and the surrounding mountains, is Erenler Sofrasi, an oasis of civility and fine taste, where you will be introduced to the tasty cuisine of Southwestern Turkey.

Day 2 (Wednesday) : After breakfast, our Chef will tell you about local produce and styles of cooking, upon which we will take you to one of our colourful and plentiful local farmers’ markets. Here we will shop for the ingredients of the same afternoon’s hands-on cooking session. This day will be devoted to olive-oil based mezes, the famous vegetarian appetizers and starters for which Turkish cuisine is famous. Five different specialties will be prepared and sampled. In the evening we will offer a visit to Bodrum, for its world renowned dining and nightlife. For those who would rather spend a more relaxed evening, there are also excellent dining and entertainment options only 10 minutes from our houses.

Day 3 (Thursday) : This morning you will have your breakfast in the home of one of our resident artisans, whose mother will serve home-made bread, jams, olives and fresh cheeses. After breakfast, the lady will teach you how to make jams, be it citrus or peach, depending on the season. She will then lead an expedition into the hills to recognise and collect edible wild greens, one of the gustatory prides of the region.

 In the early afternoon we will take an excursion to the Bafa Lake region, famous for its olive groves. In the season (August to November) we will participate in picking olives with the natives and visit an olive-oil processing plant where you will see how oil is extracted from the olive, a mighty fruit that has been cultivated in these parts since time immemorial. If it’s too late for olives (December to March) we will take you on a wild-mushroom hunt with experts who have been doing it since childhood. We will return to our own Erenler Sofrasi restaurant for the evening meal. A guest chef will demonstrate and then serve some of his specialties.

Day 4 (Friday) : After breakfast at Yarbasan, we will take you for a guided tour of the farmers’ market in Bodrum, the largest and most elaborate food market in the region. Here we will be shopping for the ingredients to be used in the dishes that we will prepare this day from purveyors who grow them in their own orchards. The hands-on cooking class will be based on hot starters and you will be learning to prepare three different dishes, and of course tasting them. Tonight, for dinner will be at one of Bodrum’s fine-dining establishments overlooking the Castle and the harbour while relishing local delicacies.

Day 5 (Saturday) : This will be a sailing day as we cruise around the bays and the islands on a spacious, luxuriously outfitted, wooden yacht (gület), whose owner, a gifted cook, will be preparing our lunch to be served on board. She will share her recipes and demonstrate her techniques as we skim the crystal clear turquoise waters of Bodrum Peninsula, where you will have a chance to take a dip and a refreshing swim. Tonight a cooking challenge is on. Back from the cruise you will find a full set of ingredients in your fridge, and hopefully take us up on the invitation to cook for dinner. Every guest will bring one dish to the table for this farewell dinner and we will award a prize for the one chosen as the best.

Day 6 ( Sunday ): After breakfast, depart for the airport to make your way back home, hopefully full and satisfied and having learned a trick or two about our cuisine.

Optional additional-day excursions:

Option 1 : Join us for a drive to a near-by village, once a major stop on the trade route of Ancient Carean days. Here you will sample Kuyu Kebabı, one of the most unique ways to cook lamb from Anatolia, home to dozens of different lamb recipes of which this is the most spectacular. They dig a hole in the ground and fill it with firewood. The wood is lit and allowed to burn down to embers. The entire lamb is suspended inside the furnace-like hole, which is then tightly sealed shut with mud. The process begins early in the morning and the lamb slowly sizzles to perfection until it is time for your lunch-picnic. It takes forty-five minutes of driving each way to enjoy this grand culinary adventure.

Option 2 : Fishing and sponge-hunting were, in the old days, the major source of income for the inhabitants of Bodrum. With tourism in place this has changed, but the old trades are still being practiced. This day’s excursion is to Tuzla, where we will participate in old-fashioned fishing. When you go fishing it is natural that you feast on fish at lunch. We will practice that time-honoured tradition at a sea-side fish restaurant, where they will regale us with ultra-fresh fish and also show us how to tenderize an octopus (by pounding it on the rocks) before using it in a salad. There is a forty-five minute drive each way to this very memorable and increasingly harder- to-find, time-tested culinary highlight.