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 aşurelik buğday
but then you can crack it and like there are bulgurs which are
this big called bash babaşı when it's a başbaşı
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
köftes 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!