Savoury Olive Cake
A breakfast cake bringing together brined olives and olive oil — a Turkish take on the Italian savoury cake tradition.
- Time
- 50 minutes
- Serves
- 8
- Level
- Easy
- Cuisine
- Turkish
The savoury cake is Türkiye's version of the French cake salé: the sweet loaf-cake batter without sugar, made salty and full of cheese. It has settled here less as a tea-time thing than as a snack and picnic food.
The real choice in this recipe is olive oil in place of butter, and that is more than a substitution. Because olive oil stays liquid at room temperature, the cake stays soft once cooled; a savoury cake made with butter hardens in the fridge. Considered alongside the olives and the cheese, the recipe is internally coherent: all three ingredients come from the same geography.
Directions
- Heat the oven to 180°C. Grease a loaf tin with olive oil.
- Beat the eggs in a deep bowl, then stir in the olive oil and milk.
- Sift the flour, baking powder, salt and pepper together and fold gently into the wet mixture.
- Fold in the olives, cheese and parsley.
- Pour into the tin and bake in the preheated oven for 40-45 minutes.
- When a skewer comes out clean, remove it, rest for 10 minutes and slice.
Tips & storage
Flour the olives and cheese. Tossing the large pieces in a spoonful of flour before folding them in stops them sinking to the bottom. That single step changes the distribution through the slice completely.
Fold, don't beat. The olives, cheese and parsley are folded in with a spatula. Beaten in with a mixer, the gluten develops and the cake turns rubbery.
Sift the baking powder. Lumps of baking powder raise the cake in one spot and leave a bitter taste there.
Measure the salt. The olives and white cheese already carry salt; the teaspoon in the recipe is an upper limit. If your cheese is very salty, halve it.
Skewer test, but from the centre. The edges cook first. Insert the skewer in the exact middle; moist crumb is fine, wet batter is not.
Rest for ten minutes. Sliced hot, the cake falls apart. Leave it in the tin for ten minutes, then turn it out.
Storage. Two days at room temperature, four in the fridge. Being made with olive oil, it stays soft even cold.
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