I have a confession to make.. .. when i go to somewhere and people give me salads and light stuff. I might feel not so happy about it, i
might not feel fulfilled but today i'm going to
give you a recipe which will be like a salad it could be
like its main course and it will keep you full and filled
and satisfied for hours and it's very easy to make it's vegan
and it's really really guilt-free in many terms.
It is called kısır. Kısır has been around
anatolia and all these regions even going
to those Marrakech sites somehow to Bulgaria and down to the Middle East all over. One thing i forgot to tell you; now we
are making the classic kısır but after mastering it and understanding,
we can go crazy. For example, I do it with beetroot and it becomes
this incredible color and very amazing taste, I do it with melon, sour plums, sometimes in wintertime with
pomegranates, all good, all great. These are some ideas of what
you can do with kısır, how you can adapt to your own taste and
whatever you have in the kitchen. But first, let's try the basic one and we
start with this very thinly cracked with bulgur is
a very special thing that in the later on this year i want to tell you more
about. It's like this, in in many of the
countries around the world, this is called bulgur in Turkey but
around the world it's called couscous which is what tagin is
made of probably it's more famous around the world this is this small
crack wheat and you can buy it as couscous but couscous
originally when you say and go to a market in Turkey if you say couscous
it's something totally different. I need a
small time-out from making kısır because when we watch the video Bahar told me Refika you should tell
more about bulgur so here I am and I listen to what she says.
Bulgur is like Anatolia's one of the top ingredients that we use and
especially in the times of war and etc what used to keep us
going and what is bulgur.. Bulgur is actually like cracked wheat but not in
an ordinary way. First the wheat is
collected from the farms, cleaned and then
boiled and cracked and then dried but this process like in each step there's
like interesting stuff. First when it's first
collected the type of wheat should be what it is used as the pasta, it's
which is hard wheat then it had to be cleaned and I would like to show a video
of a guy who did this cleaning because it's
really hard now we have a farm and it took us ages
and i found a guy in who used to do this by hand in an
incredible way and i want to show you that. This is like magic, amazing it's like
Miyazaki's Spirits away and he said that the
thing that he was doing this with I said how did you do it, when he was
small with his father, they buy it from Halep and i said like
can we go and buy it and don't know maybe Halep is not the
same anymore so some of the things we lose on
the way. Then what happens to that wheat, as you
can see it's like it's quite big when it's cleaned, this is called aÅurelik buÄday but then you can crack it
and like there are bulgurs which are this big called bash babaÅı when it's a
baÅbaÅı bulgur exactly like this but then there
are the cracked ones and when you grind it, when you crack it it
falls in different sizes and different sizes are
good for doing different things. For example, this is good for a pilav and
pilav rice Turkish people eat some kind of rice or
pilav almost every day, near every dish ... ...almost everybody's favorite and actually
from my father's side, I'm from Cappadocia, Nevsehir, my grandfather used to be
wheat farmers and he used to make bulgur and I
have his pots to make bulgur with. In Ramadan time, we gave soup with it,
you remember? Then there's the smallest one, this is like
the left out parts but it is great for few things; want to make several different types of kƶftes also for kısır and
the good thing about bulgur different than bread.
Okay they're all carbohydrates but this takes longer time to digest
and the glycemic wise which means it doesn't
like higher up your blood sugar as much as rice
and as much as pasta, one of the reasons why
Italians are so keen on aldante is to keep the glycemic index in such a way
that it doesn't higher up your sugar level so
and bulgur has this in its nature, so it's really nice so keep in mind if
you are not a gluten-free person and if you don't eat so much bread but
you want that satisfaction bulgur will run to your help. Now i
had one and a half cup of bulgur and to that I'm going to add not a cup sorry
glass and the measurements in cups are going to be down below.
With measures of two, I'm going to put water but
if you were let's say a new bride in Anatolia in the old days,
your mother-in-law would expect from you to do this dish totally with cold water.
Why? we want all these like small pieces to be really separate and on its own so
with cold water you have to knead it like for an hour but it becomes great, I used to do it that way, your hands get scrubbed and etc but because we're not newly-weds and
we have tons of other things to do, we're going to do together
and with you it's small cheat which is half of it is going to be hot water and to one and a half glass of bulgur I put two glasses of water, now
bulgur is going to soak the water slowly and going to get expanded, I'm going to
put it on the side for a little while for it to rest at the
time we have some greens that are going to be involved in
the kısır, I'm going to cut them first and those greens are a lot of parsley,
you can use coriander, coriander also goes great with it and I have spring onions here because i know there are spring onions which are this thick as a thumb.
I'm going to use these are small from the garden so around a batch of spring onions I'm going to also put the grams down
below now all this parsley may look too much to
you but it's not, it's a great way as I said like this is
a really guilt-free dish, the balance of eating greens with
carbohydrates is very important and it gives you that
with a big satisfaction of eating something
great. I'm slicing the onions like six millimeters each
less than a centimeter. I am mincing all the parsleys
so that some get bashed and it's going to give the flavor to the bulgur more
and I'm not saying like finely chopping because it's like we call this mincing
there's another word called kiymak and I believe, it's very essential
to understand the Turkish food because we mince a lot of things and puts very
different kind of flavors and things all together
by mincing when you eat something you just like do
not get one taste but you get various tastes all
together but it's not like I'm here and I'm really dominant. It's as
if they go together and they become one orchestra and no one stands out kind of
thing. To do that you need to do a bit of mincing and this knife why i've designed
it, it's in a way like Italians mozzarella because we start almost every
dish that we do daily by mincing an onion and then making salads like this not like big leaves but small leaves like
this so I think this cuisine deserves its own
type of knife so this is how this baby came to life.
So and here we have five seven sprigs of fresh mint if the stalks are
very thick please cut them by the way if you put this
in water it's going to have its small roots and you can,
you can plant them in a pot you can plant them in a pot as Bahar said
and we have actually ones that we have planted before,
they're not so great looking but you get the idea,
you can't get your own mints like this. I chopped the mints a little
bigger than the parsley and gold just like that.
Okay the herbs are ready, I want to show you the bulgur,
here it is and what I'm going to do as you can see, it grew it's in size
almost twice and it's a little warm. I want to
just do this so that it gets cool. Then I'll make a mixture and i want it to be
on room temperature for it to soak all the
goodness of the sauce and not lose its individuality so.
Okay! To this, I'm going to add a heap
tablespoon of and a half tomato paste. Tomato paste for the ones who don't know
what it is, tomatoes at the end of the summer, it
gets crushed and cooked a bit and it becomes this incredible paste
which increases the umami the taste of
everything that it's put in and weird enough this tomato came to
Anatolia less than 200 years ago we can say from
America but now it's especially in winter times
in every dish we make because it increases the taste of
everything, so with that one and a half tablespoon of tomato paste, there's also
one and a half tablespoon of pepper paste.
This is a pepper paste that i have made, if you have like a strong and very
hot pepper paste use less, mine is rather mild,
I add half a teaspoon of salt because like
all the pepper paste differ in salt, you should
manage it yourself, it's very important and half a teaspoon of
black pepper and we're going to add one and a half heap teaspoon of cumin,
this is going to give incredible taste and for the taste to
get in we need a lot of olive oil which i just
have ran out of, about 80 milliliters,
six to seven tablespoons of olive oil. I'm just putting, it just
on the paste so when i mix it, it's going to be mixed all together so
now time to transfer the taste of your hands,
the energy from your hands to your food. So i'm getting in... If you cannot find pepper paste, you can
use tomato paste and vice versa. You start to get hungry? Now, when you mix it all it's time to
taste. It's really nice, I can add more salt. This is also raw food and very very healthy in that sense as well so if your
orchestra's color is paler you add more paste, this is almost
ready There's something really special about bulgur, it grows in you.
For example, now you see it's almost like soggy,
it will suck all the goodness and the flavors and it's going to get grow even
bigger and if you drink water or ayran
something, it's going to get even bigger. Second reason, there are going to be lots
of vegetables that we add in that increases the amount of fibers so
digest fiber takes longer time to do so also for that reason and one
final touch is the pomegranate molasses and this is
an incredible thing, it's pomegranate juice
evaporated maybe we can do it when the season comes,
you can make it at home, if you cannot find it around. It increases the sourness
but if you say Refika we don't have this thing, you can still do the recipe
and you just add more lemons to the recipe in the end,
it's for the sour balance. I add all the greens, I
add the greens last for that not to kill them while kneading, if you want it to be more spicy,
you can add paprika always a final taste. Yes but now all my hands are
dirty you have to put some more salt because of the greens. Final touch of olive oil so all done, now the fun part comes how you
serve it. We have a big plate like this and we
have lettuces like this, this is a long one but you can use
romaine, any kind of lettuce you have would do. I cover the bottom
with these.. ..then.. ..you have to let the bulgur fall from
your hands, never squeeze it, just let it fall. From a glass and a half of bulgur a
goodness this big is ready and how we eat it.
Final touch would be a bit more sourness and in this case a bit of lemon on top
and you can add some more lemons on the side for people
if they want more lemons. This is a dish that is done
on celebrations, this is a dish when a farmer goes to
a farm in the morning they put everything in
in on the way everything gets mixed up and becomes
a dish. It can be done very simply, it can be done in a very elegant way.
Everyone in every status and every kind of place will love it and cheap, it's really healthy
and it's very very delicious, goodness wrapped in lettuce. What if you don't have any lettuce, can
you eat it? This is for today, if you don't have lettuce, you have this
spoon.. This is how we do it! Yeah the song for the kısır makes you
sing, thank you for watching this video until this time. I love you guys so much,
thank you for all the attention you're putting on the channel
and all those comments that you write really makes my day.
It's so valuable, I feel as if i'm like 18 again and a new life is beginning. Thank you so much. Take great care!
