Çılbır – The Apple Pie Café, Ambleside

For the most part, writing for The Tribudishional Food Blog takes a lot of organisation. There’s the initial search for out-of-place menu items and the weighing up of prices (yes, even I have a budget). The assessment of a dish’s suitability, the fumbling about with cocktail stick flags and corks.

But very occasionally, when the blog is the last thing on my mind, a potential post just seems to appear. Well, The Apple Pie Café’s Çılbır (pronounced chill-ber) was one of those dishes… and boy am I glad I found it.

This Turkish breakfast dish is fairly simple in composition: poached eggs sit atop a swirl of garlicky yoghurt, drizzled with melted butter and Aleppo pepper, and finished with a sprinkling of dill or mint. Yes, it’s as delicious as it sounds – perfect for a post-parkrun brunch in Ambleside, The Lake District.

Whilst çılbır is typically found in this form, variations and substitutions are common; indeed, everything The Apple Pie café served was a different ingredient to those listed above (aside from the eggs of course). Labneh – a deliciously creamy Middle Eastern cheese made from strained yoghurt – was used as the base of the dish, and the Aleppo pepper-butter mixture was swapped out with hummus and red pickled onions. Even the garnish was different, with coriander in place of the dill.

And do you know what? It worked.

The tangy labneh complimented the eggs and hummus beautifully; its thick cream-cheese-like texture (a result of straining whey out of the yoghurt) provided a firm foundation onto which the other ingredients were layered. Naturally sour and interlaced with herbs, it carried ladlefuls of flavour – something that might not have been achieved with plain Greek yoghurt, the go-to çılbır base in many online recipes.

By far the standout ingredient however, was the pickled onion. Whilst not all that traditional, the cheek-sucking intensity of the onions was exactly the thing needed to cut through the rest of the dish’s richness. Its vibrant colour caught the eye too, and raised an audible “ooh” from others around the table.

Now, when it comes to eggs, I’d say modern diners are somewhat picky. Many – including myself – have come to expect a runny yolk in an egg, especially when eating out. It’s something I’ve assigned merit to before, in my reviews of Bitoque and The Full English. I do think it’s important then, but arguably more so in some dishes than others.

On a toasted muffin in Eggs Benedict, sure. On a molten layer of Mornay in a Croque Madame, absolutely. But when the majority of the meal is already semi-liquid, as in çılbır, perhaps not. The texture variation from the set yolk was lovely, and the dish was still very much dunk-able.

Speaking of dunking, my çılbır was served with two slices of The Apple Pie Bakery’s sourdough, toasted and buttered. Whilst they made decent dippers (albeit on the small side) a little part of me had been hoping for some Pide, a fluffy Turkish flatbread – sometimes stuffed with fillings to become a meal of its own. A variation of this, called Ramazan pidesi, is traditionally eaten in Türkiye during the month of Ramadan, which was incidentally going on at the time of me eating this meal… had they brought this out, I would have been impressed. And I’m sure the rest of the table would have “ooh-ed” even more.

Many claim çılbır to be an egg-based breakfast dish that rivals the likes of Menemen and Shakshuka in taste, simplicity and popularity. It certainly does in my household, and I have the three on constant rotation as a result. As for The Apple Pie café’s çılbır, I think a Tribudishional score of 8/10 is in order. Big on flavour, texture and looks, there’s not a lot I can fault – only a larger portion would have made me happier (especially considering the £8.50 price).

That, and some Pide.

©The Tribudishional Food Blog / 2024