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Tasting Azerbaijani Food + a Recipe

There's a rift in Feride Buyuran's home. The issue is baklava.

She likes it Azerbaijani style (above). Her husband Murat is from Turkey and prefers Turkish baklava, with flaky, buttery layers of filo dough.  Buyuran is from Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, where baklava is made with thicker layers of yeast dough. 

You can buy Turkish-style baklava here, but the only way to get Baku-style baklava is to make it yourself. This means rolling out 12 sheets of dough and layering them in a pan with cardamom-scented nut filling. The recipe involves plenty of butter, syrup to moisten the nuts and a saffron glaze. 

If you're up for that, you can find the recipe in Buyuran's book, "Pomegranates & Saffron," which is the only Azerbaijani cookbook published in the United States. 

If not, the book contains plenty of easy, interesting recipes, such as the five she presented at a book signing at Melissa's Produce. They were:

Vegetable kabab salad, perfect for a summer barbecue (above). See the recipe below.

A chopped salad of cucumbers, tomatoes, bell peppers, basil and cilantro (above). 

Meatballs in a sweet-and-sour tomato sauce that is subtly flavored rather than bold like Chinese sweet and sour (above).

Crusty rice pilaf with dill and fava beans (above).

And a specialty of the city of Ganja in Azerbaijan, chicken with eggs (above).

Melissa's chefs prepared these dishes, but Buyuran made the baklava herself.

For drinks there were mint sharbat and basil sharbat, named for the Arabic word for drink.  

"Pomegranates & Saffron" is in its second edition, enlarged with new recipes from minority groups in Azerbaijan, including "Mountain" Jews and Russian Molokans.

In July, Buyuran will give a series of cooking classes, starting with dishes from Azerbaijan, then Turkish favorites, then Mediterranean flavors and finally summery vegetarian dishes.

For information on the classes, go to www.azcookbook.com/cooking classes. Click on the link "My Cookbook" to order the book. 

VEGETABLE KABAB SALAD
From "Pomegranates & Saffron"

8 medium dark-skinned eggplants, such as Italian
3 medium young green bell peppers or sweet banana peppers
1 green chile, such as a jalapeño, optional
4 medium tomatoes, ripe but firm 
1 medium onion, finely chopped (1 cup)
1 cup mixed chopped mint and cilantro
Salt
Ground black pepper

On a grill, start a bed of charcoal or wood and burn until the embers begin to glow.

Spear the whole eggplants, peppers, the jalapeño if wanted and tomatoes through their sides onto separate 1/2-inch flat metal skewers. Place the skewers on the grill and grill, turning occasionally, until the skins have charred and softened, 10 to 20 minutes.

Gently pull the vegetables from the skewers. When the vegetables are cool enough to handle, peel off the skins and cut out the stalks. Seed the peppers.

Finely chop the flesh of the vegetables and transfer to a mixing bowl. Add the onion, mint and cilantro.  Season with salt and pepper to taste and stir to mix. Serve warm.

Makes 4 servings. 

Photos by Barbara Hansen

 

Where to Go for Great Baklava

There's a disappearing act every day at Imam Cagdas.

What disappears are flat cardboard packing boxes and pan after pan of baklava.

This restaurant in Gaziantep in southeastern Turkey is so famous for baklava that people fly in from Istanbul and Ankara to load up and take it home. They also come to eat, because Imam Cagdas is the most famous restaurant in Gaziantep.

Dating from 1887, it has been in the hands of the same family for five generations. The first in the line was Imam Cagdas, who gave the restaurant its name. 

On a typical day, there's plenty of action as baklava is brought to the front, packed and carried out. If you want to eat baklava at the restaurant, you had better go early. Late in the evening it's all gone.  

Gaziantep baklava, considered Turkey's finest, is loaded with the freshest and best pistachios from the local crop. This plate from Imam Cagdas shows how generously pistachios are used. Sarma baklava on the right is rolled like stuffed grape leaves (sarma). A thin layer of pastry lets the green nuts show through.

One night the only choice was fistik ezmesi, which was all pistachios and no pastry (fistik means pistachio). 

If you're going to eat there, start with the two most popular dishes. One is the pizza-like meat pastry called lahmacun. Gaziantep style is to spread it with roasted eggplant (above), fold and eat. Another way is to top it with parsley, lemon juice and green chile.

"Normal" lahmacun--that's what it's called on the menu--is topped with lamb, tomatoes, parsley and green and red peppers (above). The meat is cut by hand. 

"Soganli" lahmacun--sogan means onion--combines the meat with onions, tomatoes, walnuts and pomegranate molasses.

The other big seller is ali nazik--grilled lamb cubes and a minced lamb kebab on a bed of roasted eggplant mixed with garlic and yogurt (above). The creamy, smoky sauce is wonderful with the meats. 

Kebabs are grilled over oak. You eat them with a tangy, spicy onion salad, which is one of several salads on the menu. They're dressed with pomegranate molasses and olive oil. 

The server above is bringing plates of grilled vegetables that include kebabs of minced lamb with pistachios.

It was a surprise to find a grilled loquat on each plate and to learn that loquats are used in Turkish cuisine. Although there are loquat trees where I live, the fruit is generally ignored. 

Components of the grill plate are eaten wrapped in bread (above).

At dinner, the food came nonstop--cheese borek, puffy breads, the yogurt drink ayran and more, until the table was so full I had to put my grilled vegetable plate on a side ledge. This happened because I was eating with a Turkish food expert, Filiz Hosukoglu, who brought members of the Cagdas family to the table.

Here she is with Talat Cagdas, who said that if the restaurant used "technology," the food would lose its taste. The kitchen staff is twice as large as it would be if mechanical shortcuts were allowed, he said. 

The people of Gaziantep are so proud of this restaurant that if you ask anyone on the street where to eat, the answer is always Imam Cagdas. The food is traditional, from a cuisine so outstanding that Gaziantep has been honored by UNESCO for its gastronomy.  

Photos by Barbara Hansen

Bulgur Gets Its Own Food Festival

This is sushi, right? Yes, but with a difference. It's made with bulgur wheat instead of rice.

You've eaten rice in a pineapple in Thai restaurants. Here the pineapple is stuffed with bulgur.

I ate as much of this as I could. It's a sort of cheesecake made with bulgur. Delicious.

Bulgur risotto, bulgur ravioli (above), bulgur-stuffed artichokes--almost anything you could think of turned up at the recent Bulgur Festival in Gaziantep in southeastern Turkey. 

Even desserts such as the syrup-soaked shredded pastry kadayif (above) were tweaked to include bulgur.

Why a bulgur festival in this city? Because Gaziantep produces 70% of Turkey's annual output of more than 1 million tons of bulgur, serving as a processing center for wheat grown in the region.

If you're new to bulgur, it's wheat that has been cleaned, boiled and dried, then ground into a variety of sizes. 

The weekend festival promoted bulgur in the best possible way--by letting people eat as much as they could. The opening display of 101 bulgur dishes (above) was quickly demolished when ceremonies and speeches were over.  

Booths dispensed Turkish dishes such as pilaf and the bulgur salad kesir. One offered freshly boiled wheat called hedik, sweetened and combined with crushed pistachios. 

Cig kofte (above) is Turkey's version of steak tartare, made with raw lamb kneaded with bulgur and red peppers fermented until black. Eating it wrapped in a lettuce leaf is Prof. Dr. Mustafa Bayram of the Food Engineering Department of the University of Gaziantep. He's a leading authority on bulgur. 

Bulgur manufacturers were on hand to talk about their products and offer generous tastes. I saw long yellow grains of bulgur that could be cooked like rice. And bulgur combined with roasted vermicelli so that cooks preparing bulgur this way don't have to roast the vermicelli separately. 

Panels focused on how good bulgur is for you and how easy it is to cook--the grains have been boiled already, so they cook quickly. And how seamlessly bulgur blends into almost any cuisine. 

To prove this, chefs from international restaurants in Istanbul showed off their innovations. Olivier Piste, executive chef of the Shangri-La Hotel (above), made a bulgur salad with fried squid.

Giovanni Terricciato of the Movenpick Hotel (above) made risotto with eggplant, tomatoes, basil and mozzarella, sprinkling it with pistachios--Gaziantep is also the pistachio capital of Turkey.

You'll never find chicken biryani with bulgur in India. Nevertheless, Chef Imran Rana of Musafir Indian Restaurant (above) gave it a try, and festival goers clustered around as he showed how to cook it in authentic dum style, layered in a pot sealed with dough (above). 

Korean bibim bap with bulgur (above) was a great success.

I liked the way TV chef Yunus Emre Akkor, an authority on Ottoman cuisine (above), cooked bulgur with clarified butter and turmeric, then suggested using it as the base for sautéed lamb. Ottoman gourmands prized yellow foods, he said. If they didn't have saffron, they used turmeric. 

A fierce downpour with thunder and lightning sent people scurrying to tents and umbrellas. Others jammed into an open-air pavilion where food was handed to you as soon as you sat down.

Some escaped the rain in the restaurant Senfoni. My lunch plate there (above) included the bulgur salad kesir, a yogurt, eggplant and meat salad, another salad with tomatoes and walnuts and flat bread.

But mostly, the weather was good, and people enjoyed picnicking on the grounds. The camel behind this group is covered with bulgur. 

Outside in city markets bulgur is always on display because it is heavily used in Turkish cuisine. 

At a gala dinner (above), every course included bulgur. Sourdough bread was made with bulgur flour. Starters included diced beets in yogurt with bulgur. A creamy mixture blended two types of yogurt with bulgur, caramelized onions and spicy oil. Kesir was dressed up with squid ink, shrimp and pistachios.

A ring of golden turmeric yogurt surrounded beef cheek stew with bulgur "meatballs," spicy tomato sauce and thyme salad (above). 

Lamb shank (above) came with firik and bulgur risotto and bulgur crisps. Firik (freekeh) is freshly harvested wheat that is parched, not boiled like bulgur.

Dessert (above) was a bulgur tour de force. Even the cake was made with bulgur. Bulgur ice cream on a bed of caramelized puffed bulgur was fabulous.

What impressed me was that all the dishes at the festival "worked." Nothing seemed odd or forced. Bulgur was created thousands of years ago, the first processed food made from wheat. Thank heavens that happened. The first dish I cooked when I got home was bulgur pilaf. Even if you cook only that, you will have a great dish in your repertoire. 

Photos by Barbara Hansen

A Turkish Cooking Class in Gaziantep

I'm now making the most delicious Turkish pilaf. It's bulgur pilaf, packed with bright and healthy things such as bell peppers and tomatoes. And it's so easy you could throw it together at the last minute for dinner or to take to a party.  

The recipe is from Kamuran Dover (at the top), a caterer and cooking teacher in Gaziantep, a city in southeastern Turkey that is on UNESCO's list of places with great gastronomy.

As part of a group attending Gaziantep's inaugural bulgur festival, I went to Dover's home for a cooking class. Her spotless apartment was set up not just for the class but for an elegant dinner afterward.

We crowded into the kitchen, taking notes as she prepared more food than we could possibly eat. The pilaf came first, starting with the sautéing of vegetables in olive oil (above). To these she added tomato and red pepper pastes and canned tomatoes. 

Then in went coarse bulgur, water, salt and generous pats of butter (above). The butter came from Ardahan, a province in northeastern Turkey known for agriculture and livestock.

Without the butter, the pilaf becomes an excellent dish for vegans, as bulgur is known for its nutritional richness. 

After boiling, Dover let the pilaf cook over low heat until the liquid was absorbed. Then she turned off the heat and placed a double layer of paper towels under the lid to collect excess moisture. This is how the pilaf looked when she dished it up.   

Next came eggplant cooked with peppers and tomatoes. Dover presented the eggplant two ways, one vegetarian and the other topped with sautéed diced lamb (above).

Both fresh and dried mint went into a salad along with sour cherry molasses that Dover had made herself (above).

I was astonished to learn that she prepares everything she cooks with, even condiments such as red pepper and tomato pastes and dried red pepper flakes that are readily available in local markets. The canned tomatoes she added to the pilaf were homemade too.  

I had never seen anything like her bread salad, made with flakes of a dried bread called yufka ekmek. These she crushed even finer, mixing in peppers, onions, tomatoes, her homemade seasoning pastes, red pepper flakes, olive oil and shredded Antep cheese (above).

Rather than piling the loose mixture into a salad bowl, she formed it into little kebabs (above). 

I had seen purslane (verdolaga) in produce displays in Gaziantep and wondered how it was used. One way is the hearty soup that Dover had made before we came (above).

She combined the greens with lentils, chickpeas, black-eyed peas, bulgur, garlic and vegetables, adding cherry molasses and sumac molasses and finishing with a drizzle of red pepper flakes heated in oil. The soup alone would have been enough for dinner.

Then we went to the dining table, which was beautifully set with fine linens and china. 

Dinner ended with fresh fruit and Turkish tea (you can see us taking photos in the mirror behind the table).

Dover wanted to know which dishes we liked best. Well, everything. But I singled out the bread salad omac. I couldn't stop eating it.

The dishes she taught were practical and easy to make back home. Markets that stock Middle Eastern ingredients have everything needed, including tomato and red pepper pastes from Turkey, breads that could be substituted for yufka ekmek in the salad omac,  Turkish cheeses and pomegranate molasses, which could replace Dover's sour cherry molasses. 

After dinner, we settled into plushy gold-upholstered chairs in the parlor (above) and talked like old friends. Dover was married at the age of 14, lost her husband in a traffic accident (his photograph is above the mirror behind the dining table) and developed the catering business to support herself. She showed us a huge freezer packed with food for her clients. 

As we left, we retrieved our shoes. Turkish custom is to remove them before entering a home, and we were given slippers so that we would be comfortable during the evening. 

Dover welcomes tourists to her classes. She doesn't speak English, but a translator will be provided. It's a unique opportunity to see genuine Turkish home cooking and then enjoy a superb meal.

To inquire about her classes, contact Filiz Hosukoglu, who works with her and speaks excellent English. Her email is filizhosukoglu@gmail.com. 

TURKISH BULGUR PILAF
From Kamuran Dover of Gaziantep

2 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 medium green bell pepper, diced small
1/2 medium red bell pepper, diced small
1/2 medium onion, diced small
1 medium tomato, diced small
1 tablespoon tomato paste
1 tablespoon Turkish red pepper paste
1/2 cup canned tomatoes
1 1/2 cups coarse bulgur
3 cups hot water
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
2 tablespoons butter

Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan. Add the green and red peppers and the onion and cook until they start to soften. Add the tomato and cook until tender. Stir in the tomato paste and red pepper paste, then add the canned tomatoes and stir until blended.

Add the bulgur, hot water and salt, then add the butter and let melt.

Cover the pan and bring to a boil. Lower the heat and cook until the liquid is absorbed but the bulgur is still soft and not dry. Turn off the heat. Place a double layer of paper towels until the lid to absorb steam and let the pilaf stand for half an hour.  Reheat if necessary.

Makes 8 servings.