In the Kitchen: Dolma and Sarma with Hatice, Fatoş, and Ayşe

This time when I returned to Adana, Turkey, Fatoş invited me to watch (and “help” in) the preparation of a few of my very favorite Turkish dishes: sarma and dolma.

Hatice and Fatoş stuffing grape leaves

Sarma is made by filling either cabbage or grape leaves with a herbed rice, while dolma is made by stuffing eggplant, peppers, or zucchini with the same rice mixture. If you see this dish at a restaurant or in a home, ensure that it is etsiz (meatless) because it is also common to find dolma and sarma stuffed with ground meat.

Three varieties of dolma—eggplant, peppers, and zucchini

When I arrived, Fatoş and Hatice had already stuffed the peppers and scooped out and stuffed the eggplant and zucchini. As you can see in the picture above, they used bits of grape leaves to seal the eggplant and zucchini in preparation for cooking.

My lovely sister-in-law, Ayşe, had completed the first step in making sarma the night before, when she picked dozens of grape leaves from the vine in front of her parent’s house. Then the grape leaves were blanched briefly in plain, unsalted water until they were soft but still strong.

Next, the rice mixture was prepared using uncooked rice, onion, garlic, salça, parsley, mint, oil, salt, and black pepper.

I watched as Ayşe, Hatice, and Fatoş expertly filled and wrapped each grape leaf tightly. Making sarma and dolma is a time-consuming process, requiring many steps and often taking the better part of a day, so these dishes are traditionally made by a group of women. The women swap recipes, gossip, watch each other’s children, and provide support to each other while preparing, stuffing, and cooking their sarma and dolma.

After watching how each grape leaf was stuffed, I gave it a try myself. At first I was tempted to put far too much filling in, but the ladies quickly helped me out, explaining that the rice would expand when it cooked and it was important that the leaf was tightly wrapped so it wouldn’t unravel during cooking.

    

To cook the sarma and dolma, Fatoş added a few tablespoons of salt and filled the pot about halfway with water and about a half cup of oil. She then topped everything with a circular stone, specially made to weigh down the sarma so they don’t come unwrapped while cooking. (If you don’t have a special stone you can use a plate weighed down with a few cans.) Once the water boiled, though, she removed the stone and put the lid on the pot.

Toward the end of cooking, Fatoş and Hatice made a sauce to pour over the sarma and dolma. They started by making a paste of garlic and salt in a mortar and pestle, then heated some oil and salça in a pan. Once the salça had colored the oil, they added the garlic paste then poured the sauce over the sarma and dolma.

Afiyet Olsun! May it bring you health!

In the Kitchen: Patata Tahineh and Mu’ajanat with Jamilah

In Amman, my host’s mother, despite trying to good-naturedly convince me to eat some chicken, often cooked entire meals of the most delicious vegan dishes. Jamilah’s favorite thing to say to me was “Kuli! Kuli!” (Eat!) and in response to her command, my favorite thing to say to her was “Zeki!” (Delicious!). And it’s true. Everything she made was so fresh and delicious that I didn’t want to stop eating.

I wish I had spent more time in her kitchen, simply watching her cook. She made a dish of stewed greens straight from her garden and a dip of tomatoes and zucchini which I still think about now. I was fortunate, however, to get a few pictures and a recipe during my brief time in Amman.

Patata Tahineh

This simple and sublime dish tastes remarkably like humus but comes together without a blender and, with no need to soak chickpeas, in considerably less time.

4 medium potatoes

2 cloves garlic

1 tsp salt

juice from 1.5 lemons

1/3 cup tahini

olive oil (for garnish)

parsley (for garnish)

Boil, bake, or microwave the potatoes until cooked. In the meantime, using a mortar and pestle, pound the garlic and salt together until they form a smooth paste (the addition of salt makes this process easy and fast). Mash the cooked potatoes by hand, then add the garlic, salt, and lemon juice. Mix in the tahini. Garnish with a squeeze of lemon juice, drizzle of olive oil, and chopped fresh parsley. Serve with fresh bread for dipping.

Jamilah also served her patata tahineh with a pickle her mother had made called makdous. Makdous is made from little eggplants that have been stuffed with walnuts and shatta and preserved in olive oil.

Shatta is an important part of Jordanian cuisine, and Jamilah always had a bowl fermenting in her kitchen. Shatta is made from a mix of sweet and spicy red peppers which are mixed together and allowed to ferment for one month. You can see a little bowl of shatta in the first picture in the upper right-hand corner.

Mu’ajanat

On my last night in Amman, before I hitchhiked south to Aqaba and Petra and Wadi Rum, Jamilah made a traditional and naturally vegan mu’ajanat. Mu’ajanat refers to a wide range of savory pastries and that evening she made two kinds—one stuffed with cheese and one stuffed with spinach.

 

She made the dough with whole wheat flour, which is apparently a traditional recipe not a new-fangled, inspired-by-the-resurgence-of-whole-foods approach. She then filled the dough with a mix of spinach and onions and added shatta to a few as well.

She then formed them into triangles and baked the mu’ajanat until they were just brown and crispy. Jamilah made a pot of Jordanian-style black tea, which is brewed with fresh mint, as it is traditional to drink tea while eating mu’ajanat.

The next step was simple. “Kuli! Kuli!” Jamilah commanded and I was happy to comply.  As with everything she made, these mu’ajanat (especially the ones with added shatta) were truly zeki.

In the Kitchen with Fatoş

Fatoş is another mother to me, and every time I come to Adana, in southern Turkey, she cooks my favorite vegan Turkish foods. Most recently, I spent an afternoon in the kitchen with her as she prepared homemade ıspanklı börek.

There are many different types of börek, which makes it a difficult food to describe. It consists of thin savory pastry dough and a filling—whether meat, cheese, potatoes, or spinach. Some börek is stuffed and rolled into crescents or circles, another is tightly layered and baked in a water bath, but Fatoş’s börek is more like a stuffed flatbread.

She starts with fresh chopped spinach and onions, adds some salça (see this post for more information on this staple of Turkish cuisine), oil, salt, and a touch of cumin. Everything is raw, as the filling will cook inside the bread.

Here you can see the workspace. On the left is the dough—a simple dough of flour, water, yeast, and salt which has risen once—then some flour for rolling, two rolling pins, and the spinach filling. In this part of Turkey it is very common to prepare food and eat on a checkered cloth like this one on the floor. When eating, you simply make sure that your feet and body are next to or under the cloth, often tucking the cloth into your lap. I once made the mistake of walking across the cloth the first time that I ate like this, but the cloth is like a table. You wouldn’t put your feet on the dining table!

In the following video you can see how the dough is rolled out into the perfect thin circle in preparation for stuffing.

Here you can see Fatoş arranging the filling in the very thin circle of dough, folding the dough over and sealing the börek.

Next we cooked each piece of börek in a special flat, wide pan, snacking and chatting as we did. Normally, many women would gather together to make börek, as it is a time-intensive dish. From preparing the dough and letting it rise, making the filling, rolling out the dough until it is paper-thin, then stuffing, sealing, and cooking each piece of börek, the process often take an entire day. And when you make börek, it would be a waste to only make a small batch, so as you can see in the picture above, we made a little mountain of börek and I was happily eating it for the next two meals.

In the Kitchen With Ayşe

This is the first in my new “In the Kitchen” series. With “In the Kitchen”, my aim is to observe home cooks in action as they prepare a signature vegan dish from their culinary culture. I’ll begin with the beautiful Ayşe preparing a traditional Turkish dish called kısır, which is a bulgur and veggie salad flavored with salça and nar ekşisi, two staples of the Turkish pantry.

I still remember clearly the first time I ate kısır. My brother and his wife, Ayşe, had just moved to the States from where he was stationed in Turkey and it was my first time visiting them in their new home. Ayşe asked if I would like to try a dish she often made back home called kısır. She assured me it was vegan, so of course I was game. I watched as she chopped up veggies, steamed and seasoned bulgur, then combined them all in the largest bowl they had. The bulgur took on a beautiful reddish hue, speckled through with bits of green. The flavor was like nothing I had ever tasted before and I kept going back for bowl after heaping bowl.

Now, just about every time I visit them, I ask Ayşe if we can make kısır together. The truth is that no one makes it like she does—it just never tastes as good!

She graciously agreed to let me into her kitchen to watch and document how she makes this delicious Turkish dish.

First, Ayşe steams the fine bulgur by pouring boiling water over it then covering the bowl with a kitchen towel. The bulgur will plump and soften as it absorbs the hot water. Next, she carefully washes the veggies. She thoroughly washes the parsley and lettuce with some water and vinegar, peels the tomatoes, half-peels the cucumber so it has alternating stripes of light and dark green, then washes and chops the green peppers and the green onions.

Now, Ayşe has told me that every cook makes kısır differently. Some add minced garlic, purple cabbage. Some even add sauteed white onions. The only constants in kısır tend to be the green onions, parsley, tomatoes, and green peppers. Even the quantity of each is a matter of taste and preference.

The next step is to season the steamed bulgur. This is the crucial step with gives kısır its unique and uniquely Turkish flavor. For this, Ayşe uses homemade (never store-bought) salca, nar eksisi, and oil. She seasons by sight and taste. When I asked how much salca to use, she said that she uses enough to turn the bulgur the perfect shade of red. As for how much oil, she uses just enough to make each grain of bulgur shiny.

Salca is an intensely flavored sundried red pepper paste. In the village where Ayşe’s family lives, women work together once a year to make this essential item in the Turkish pantry. In groups of ten or more, starting with about 100 kilos of sweet, long red peppers, the women remove the stems, deseed, and chop each pepper. Then a man comes by whose one job during this time of year is to grind the prepared peppers into a paste with a special machine. This paste is then sprinkled with salt, spread thinly, and left to dry in the sun for a few days. For these few days, every balcony, every suitable surface in the village is used for drying the red pepper paste. After the paste has dried, it is once again passed through the special grinding machine to make an even finer paste. This salca will be used throughout the rest of the year, and with a little oil and onions, will form the base for almost every dish.

Nar eksisi is another common ingredient in the Turkish kitchen. It is made from pomegranate juice which has been boiled for hours and hours, if not days, until it reaches a thick, syrupy consistency. It has a pleasant sourness which is often used in salads in addition to, or as a replacement for, lemon juice.

After seasoning the bulgur,  Ayşe adds the finely chopped veggies, mixes everything together, and checks the flavor. Does the kısır need more oil? Does it need salt? (Because salca contains differing amounts of salt, a taste test is necessary.) At this point, if she wants to add some heat, Ayşe sometimes sprinkles some spicy red pepper flakes into the kısır.

Kısır can be eaten as is, but is often scooped into lettuce leaves and eaten with pickled spicy green peppers. As they say in Turkey at every meal, Afiyet Olsun! May it bring you health!