Hi everyone, this is Refika and today I would like to cook with you one of the
best egg recipes that I know in my life and it's called menemen.
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To make the basic menemen, the ingredients are very simple; eggs, tomatoes and
peppers in various places in the world this recipe is called
in different names most famous is shakshuka but today I'm going to cook
with you the perfect Turkish eggs. I'll add naughtiness like this, naughtiness like
this. Turkish naughtiness, you will learn through the video as the video evolves.
First, the tomatoes when I was young, still I am.
When I was younger, I would never take the skins of the tomatoes but as you get
less younger, you want everything to taste even better
taking the skins off helps the texture, the smoothness when you put a bit of
bread and take the eggs out how it distributes in your mouth is so
different, so taking the skins of help. Now for the skins, we no more throw these
skins because these are organic food what we do is find a piece of soil
somewhere and dig it and then put all the organic stuff in our kitchen, close
it down and it becomes a fertilizer very soon. So, tomatoes are peeled, I put them
on the side and then we have two green peppers, these are not spicy in some
parts of the world you cannot find this type of not spicy green peppers. If you
cannot, you can use green bell peppers. If you cannot find anything that is not
spicy use a bit of spicy but very small, so that it doesn't ruin your eggs. That's
all the preparation I'm going to have. Now I'll turn the heat but how to cook
menemen is very important, you can make your eggs in one minute but
you can also make them in 10 minutes. How you cook them changes the taste
incredibly so I turn to the smallest; I'm going to translate it directly from
Turkish, smallest eye of the stove, smallest thing that gives the fire. Anyway I put
it on the smallest eye and then turn the heat slightly down and I'm going to add
two tablespoons of butter. If you ask a French guy it's too little, if you ask my
mom it's too much, if you ask me it's the perfect. The thing is the butter has
about 15 to 20 percent of milk inside, the rest is fat as we can see the
butter is not like see through, clear but it's like foggy and whitish. The reason
is the milk beside of it makes it that way. But what we are going to do, slowly
with the heat, some of the milk particles are going to sink and it will turn in a
bit of brown and has that nutty flavor and we want that nutty flavor
it means taste. Slowly, as you can see, it's turning there's going to be a foam
at the top also another part of the milk but as you can see from the first moment
getting more clear when this is really heated and the foam gets away and the
sinking is left and what's left is just pure fat and that's called the clarified
butter. I believe this is tastier than the clarified butter. So I'm going to let
it burn a bit, a little. When you have like small brown dots, it's caramelized
milk. Now as you can see, it's not foggy, clear and the milk particles has not browned
yet but I'm going to let them brown together with the peppers and the
peppers will cook a little bit. Of course, you can use olive oil, if you were my mom
who would definitely use olive oil, you can use sunflower oil, hazelnut oil we
have in Turkey. It's very good but butter works in miracles together with eggs.
As our French friends Alex would say! As you can see, the butter became really
seated that's how it tastes really develops. I'm going to dice the tomatoes.
So that they will cook evenly. Yes, you can. Fresh tomatoes always works better
but sometimes really hard to find, so you can use the puree or can dice tomatoes
would do as well but the taste slightly changes. Even in Turkey this technique is
not really really used. Now how I cook this is going to make the whole
difference. The heat is as slowest. I have two tomatoes inside. I put a lid on and
going to wait for about 6 to 8 minutes for the tomatoes to simmer
and slowly cook.
My tomatoes are cooking slowly, like two minutes later if I break some eggs the
Menem is going to be ready but I would like to add some naughty stuff. This is
Turkish sucuk and the taste is very close to chorizo. Everyone can find you chorizo,
everywhere, no? Because we have the sucuk, it is almost the same.
That's difference, yeah. I'm going to use about 60 grams of sucuk. I took the skin
off, I'm going to make thin stripes. We should definitely do how to make Turkish
sucuk, actually I have a technique which I make it in ten minutes. So if you
want what you can use to subscribe to the channel and there is something
called like the bell, if you press it twice, it will inform you anytime we put
a video on. Now sucuk going to give a bit of fat and a lot of spice and
tastes. Together with this we have something called as pastirami. Pastırma
actually, but it's very different than what like in New York there's ...
pastrami sandwiches is different. It comes from the word bastırma. Bastırma is
to press. How this meat was done a Turkish people used to live in middle
Asia as nomads on horses. So they would travel all the time, so with the meat
they find and they have to take care cure it somehow. They were covered with a
lot of spice which smells incredible, the meat would be dried between their ties
and the back of the horse. It would be squeezed, bastırma, pressed the shape and
the taste would come from that. Today, hopefully, it's not done with the horses
and the tie of a man but it's a big industry and smells incredible.
But if you cannot find pastırma you can use prosciutto or you can use bacon.
I'm going to have to slice because it's like filled with incredible taste. The
thing is what's around is spices and a bit of paste. What happens in cured meats
is there's something called umami and umami makes all the other tastes even
better, shows itself in stuff like parmesan cheese, cured meat like pastırma,
prosciutto and when you add small amount of its to a dish it hires all the
other tastes. Whatever you cook if you like add a few parts of prosciutto, pastırma
it makes a whole difference. Now the tomatoes, it's now smelling incredibly
nice. the reason it smells so nice is the
caramelized butter.
Now I smash the tomatoes .l want to make it like a puree but by smashing it like
this and not adding a puree gives character and taste. And I add the sucuk
and the pastırma.
And a bit of like a tablespoon of kaşar and I mix all this. This is like a
melting cheese, we need a melting cheese you can use mozzarella, a young cheddar
or a gouda. So I mix everything together and now it's filled with taste. I do not
add any salt because the sucuk and pastırma are with salt, so if you do not
add any meats, you want to make it a vegetarian one, you need to add a bit of
salt. So now I break two eggs, I mix them
it starts smell so much. I can promise you, if French people
were making this egg, this would be a world famous, may be even more famous
than scrambled one. It's still on the lowest heat, I add more cheese like this. For all
the recipes any grams and anything, we have it down as a recipe. So if you miss
anything you can read the recipes and find it out. I have add red flake pepper.
If I was the menemen, I would dance as well. I closed the lid
of the pan and with lowest heat. When the cheese melts, it is going to be ready to eat.
You need a good bread for it.
Noww..! If we're all ready, our minimum is ready too. This is really what the
taste is all about. And French people have their baguette and we have this
white, to tell you the truth not so healthy but incredibly tasty bread. It is
really soft inside and really crunchy outside what it's really good for is
because it's spongy whatever you dip it with, it sucks all the great
waters inside, the juice. I'm going to have the first spoon out of this.
Three people and a bit of bread would be very happy to eat this. This one? impossible. It
would be too much for one person, huh?
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