A Spicy Red Pepper Spread with Toasted Walnuts and Pomegranate Molasses

acuka - a spicy red pepper spread

This really pushes all my buttons. Give me this and leave me to die.

In Western Turkey  it is known as  acuka  (pron: a-joo-ka) but the further south you go, especially to the southeast, it becomes muhammara. I love the sound of that. It originates from Aleppo in Syria.

 Forget sweet jams or weetabix or cheerios for this is a typical Turkish breakfast spread that you put on bread.  It is delicious beyond belief. But interestingly enough, TT doesn’t know it and today I was with my English friends all of whom have been here a long time, and they didn’t know about it either. I really can’t explain why we don’t know.

acuka: serve with bread, crackers or indeed as a dip

I have been on the track of acuka for a few weeks now, ever since discovering a little pot of it at a local supermarket, albeit an upmarket one, Nezih Gürme Market, here in Selami Çeşme in Istanbul.  It was called Ev Acukası/home acuka.  I bought it unhesitatingly and it was devoured within days. It is fabulous but the thought crossed my mind that I could probably make it myself as I read what the ingredients were.  So I sat down at the computer and discovered that yes, there are lots of recipes out there.  I carefully deliberated, compared, and finally chose to try this one from the blog New York's Delight as it sounded very authentic. I wasn’t disappointed. Try it and I think you will agree.

I am thrilled with the result! It is one of the best tastes that I have enjoyed for a very long time!

Ingredients

Fills 2-3 jars

½ cup pepper paste (tatlı or acı – sweet or hot)

½ cup tomato paste

1 cup walnuts, coarsely chopped

¼ cup bread crumbs OR ¼ cup fine bulgur soaked in ¼ cup boiling water till soft

this is what we use in Turkey

3-4 garlic cloves, crushed

Juice of ½ lemon

¼ cup olive oil

1 tbsp pomegranate molasses /nar ekşisi

1 tsp salt

Spices as follows:

1 tsp paprika/tatlı kırmızı biber

2 tsp hot Maraş pepper/crushed red hot pepper (optional)

1 tsp oregano/kekik

½  tsp black pepper

½  tsp dried mint/nane

½  tsp allspice/yenibahar

½  tsp cumin/kimyon

Pinch cinnamon/tarçin

Method

·         Put pepper and tomato pastes, bread crumbs or bulgur, crushed garlic, lemon juice, olive oil, and salt into a mixing bowl.

·         Heat frying pan and gently toast chopped walnuts for a few minutes. This releases their natural oils and gives the dish additional flavour. Add to mixture.

toasting the walnuts



·         In the same frying pan, heat and toast the spices for a few minutes. Add to to the mixture. Mix well.

all those spices added with the bulgur

·         If you need a little more salt, add a bit more. If you want the dish to be a bit more garlicky, add another clove of garlic. The garlic is what really adds to the taste of this dish.

·         Mix everything well together and serve either with bread as a spread or with crackers as a dip. I must say, in Turkey it would be with bread as the idea of dips is not common.

mixing it all together



Tips

      Consistency is up to you. TT and I prefer chunky but you may like it smoother. In that case,     blitz those walnuts till they are finer.

1.       I don’t know how easy it is to find pepper paste outside Turkey. If you can’t, I would suggest making up the amount with the very best tomato paste that you can find.

2.       All the spices are also arbitrary. I made my acuka today using exactly the measurements specified above and we found the result absolutely scrumptious!

 Afiyet Olsun!

Turkish Çay demystified

I love tea and I especially love Turkish çay.

look at that!

It has its own special ritual something akin to fixing cocktails at 6pm with its own clink of glasses and the sound of filling the kettle and then the wait.  I think it all comes down to anticipation while getting those seductive little glasses out. By the way, did you know that they are affectionately known as Ajdas, after Ajda Pekkan, the iconic - and curvaceous - singer?

remember this, Mark? buying kilims and sofras at Hasan and Adnan's


Offering a glass of çay is part of the fabric of life here so you'll find yourself sipping it at the butcher's, in the bank, while debating the purchase of a carpet in the Grand Bazaar ...Turks use çay as a social lubricant, a sign of their great hospitality, the thinking being that any situation will be better if tea is served. And so it is.
But there is a huge difference between good tea and average tea, between brewed and stewed. Not everyone can make good tea, not even Turks as they readily admit. 8 times out of 10, my çay tastes very nice but the other 2 times, it can be downright horrible. The skill lies in knowing how many spoonfuls of tea to put in the pot.

these are market çaycıs: they offer tea to the stallholders

So what do you need to embark on making Turkish çay? First of all, get yourself a nice çaydanlık seti: this is a set of 2 kettles one on top of the other like a Russian samovar. The smaller one on top is called the demlik while the larger one on which it rests is the çaydanlık.  I am assuming that you have already succumbed and bought yourself a set of those enchanting tulip-shaped glasses with the little saucers.

The best çay comes from Black Sea areas like Rize and the supermarkets have shelves full of different varieties. We like Ahmad Çayı which is a nice strong tea. Turks are very fond of making their own blends eg by adding a hint of Earl Grey. Until very recently the best present you could bring a Turk was a packet of that oh so English of teas back from the UK. You will also see packets of demlik poşet which are special teabags made just for making tea in the Turkish way and are quite new on the scene. They are not instant like PG Tips.

If it is just my husband and me, I will put one very heaped teaspoon each plus one for the pot just like we do with English tea, in the smaller kettle.  The idea is that the leaves will warm while the water below is coming to the boil. When it does, you pour some on top of those leaves so it is quite liquid, and give it a good stir before turning the heat down and timing it 10 minutes. No more no less. I use a timer for this crucial part of the process! Too long and it will taste bitter. Never try to make English tea like this.

Pouring the tea depends on how your guests like it: it is a good idea to ask. I like it demli which means strong but many prefer it açık or weak. So adjust how much you put in the glasses- a finger is about right -, and then continue filling from the larger kettle. When you finish pouring, don't forget to top up both kettles. I use my electric kettle to boil more water speedily just for this. For large groups, many Turkish hostesses have 2 çaydanlıks on the go plus their electric kettle.

this is a good glass of çay: on the ferry to Karaköy

Colour is the thing: a good glass of çay should be tavşan kanı or the colour of rabbits blood! We aim for this but others might find it too strong.

One of the greatest sources of pleasure or keyif in Istanbul is drinking çay on a vapur or ferry as you cross the Bosphorus on a sunny day with the seagulls swooping overhead, that unforgettable skyline of the Old City ahead of you and a tost or one of those delicious toasted cheese sandwiches in your hand. Don't miss the opportunity!

çaydanlıks on the ferry



Enjoy!

Beautiful Turkish Olives

 If you have travelled along the Aegean coast of Turkey,  you will have seen scores and scores of gnarled silvery-leafed olive trees clinging to hillsides and lining every little country road. Everywhere you look you see olive groves.  In our area every village family owns at least some olive trees and their living depends partly on the success of the harvest that year. Unfortunately this year despite a promising start, it hasn’t been good due to the excessive heat in August. This income is supplemented by owning sheep, cattle, and by doing other manual jobs –basically whatever they can get. For example, Mehmet is not only our gardener and handyman but the local barber of his village, Paşaköy.

The olive picking season which started at the end of October is almost over and what a backbreaking business it is. When we were in Assos last weekend, the village seemed dead on New Year’s Day not because the villagers were sleeping off their excesses but because they had all gone to zeytin as they say. They were profiting from the fine weather as it was neither cold nor windy.  It takes whole families, men and women, with occasional hired labour to bring in the crop which traditionally they do by beating the branches and letting the olives rain down on sheets of canvas or plastic.

our nextdoor neighbour's green olive harvest

It took me a little while to realize that green olives are simply unripened black ones and not a totally different species. It all depends on when you pick them. When you are next out and about and spy an olive stall, have a careful look: some of the olives will be labeled ‘çizik’ and others ‘kırma’: literally ‘slit’ and ‘crushed’. This refers to what has been done to them and by the way only to green and pink ones. This is done by hand usually which is why these never reach the big supermarkets. Think of the work! They are put in salty water and kept there for 2-4 weeks, the idea being to release the bitter water inside each one which otherwise makes them inedible.

Hatice's çizik zeytin - can you see the slits?

In Turkey Gemlik grown in the Gemlik area near Bursa is the most common type of olive and is sold as a breakfast olive or sofralık zeytin.  These are small to medium-sized black olives and are treated in one of two basic ways: sele and salamura. I  have to confess that I was a bit hazy about these myself so doing some reading on the subject prior to blogging about it proved fascinating.

Sele, which is  also the name of the kind of basket in which they are stored, involves a lot of salt. For 100 kg of olives, 10 kg fine salt plus 15 kg coarse salt is added layer by layer on top of the olives. After resting for 2-3 days, the basket is turned upside-down every other day or every 3 days. The idea is that the salt must penetrate the olives and the bitter juices gradually seep out.  After 2-4 weeks, this bitterness will have disappeared and they will be ready to eat. They are sieved but not washed because without that salt, they will go bad. If you buy sele yourself, you will have to soak them in cold water at home before they are fit to eat.

outside the Spice Market or Mısır Çarşışı in Eminönü

The other method of treating the olives is called salamura, by far the most popular in Turkey, 90% of table olives in fact are treated in this way;  they should be picked when they are dark purple in colour. This method is more time-consuming. It still involves salt but the type of container is different as water is involved. Typically tanks or küp/huge earthenware pots are used. The recipe is to mix 100 litres spring water with 10 kg salt. 2/3 of the tank will be filled with olives. The important thing is that they should be covered with the salamura; contact with air must be avoided at all costs. To cut it short, fermentation occurs and the whole process takes 7-9 months. When the olives are removed from the salamura, they turn black after 3 days of being exposed to the air.

tuzsuz means without salt

My advice when buying olives especially initially is to go to a traditional area like Kadıkoy or Eminönü, or the major supermarkets where myriad varieties are openly displayed and you are invited to try. That’s the name of the game: don’t be shy to try not just one but several. The tastes differ enormously. In the end it’s down to personal preference, it’s as simple as that. Just make sure you wash them when you get home.

My favourite these days when supplies from the village have been exhausted is Organik from Carrefour: meaty or etli, just how I like them! 

olives are always a breakfast item except in Ramazan when the fast is broken.

The Great Turkish Breakfast



my Turkish breakfast

 This is my breakfast day in, day out, winter, summer, I love it. I never skip it. The colours, the textures, the  tastes appeal to me every time. I also like the fact it's so healthy. In comparison, cereals leave me cold.

 Breakfast really is my favourite meal. I think Turkish breakfast beats any other breakfasts hands-down although I make a concession to scrambled eggs when I'm in England. And even though I love Turkish çay, I admit that I have to have my cup of Yorkshire with milk in the morning in order to get me going.

Sunday breakfast with Ali and Susan

Traditionally a Turkish breakfast includes white cheese/beyaz peynir and olives/zeytin as well as cut up tomatoes and cucumbers. If I am going to stay anywhere for a long time, I'm so picky I take cheese and black olives with me. As far as I am concerned, only Turkish olives will do. We lived in Tokyo for a time and even though the selection was vast in the international supermarket National Azabu, I went through Spanish, Italian, Greek, you name it, and was always disappointed. It was the same with olive oil.



Sunday breakfast includes an egg

  If I wasn't so careful about calories, I would keep my olives in olive oil but I just  have them plain. I have lovely dried thyme/kekik which I usually get from my neighbour Leyla in Assos who picks it and dries it.  I crush it between my fingers and sprinkle it lavishly over everything. Oh the smell! It's so evocative. Flaked red pepper/kırmızı  biber is another must for both the cheese and olives.

 At the weekend when the weather is fine, all the little cafes along the Bosphorus here in Istanbul fill up rapidly as people relax with their friends and enjoy having their breakfasts outdoors reading the papers. It's a very typical Sunday morning thing to do here.

Just look at this picture of the ultimate Turkish breakfast served at a place called Saklı Vadi or Hidden Valley, halfway between Selçuk and Şirince tucked amongst the olive trees down towards İzmir.

 I have a friend, Frances (she of the fabulous quinces) who organizes Turkish textile tours and this is one of her favourite stops. She says there are usually 18-20 different items on the breakfast table according to season. The last time she was there, she tasted an 'extraordinary walnut jam made with the green shells whole before hardening'. The honey, cheese and salad items are all local and eating them either outside in the garden or in front of an enormous open logfire all adds to the pleasure.

So you can see my breakfast is simple compared to this feast! You certainly can't be in a hurry to savour a breakfast like this.