If Tokat province can lay claim to a dish, it is this tasty, healthy tabbouleh-like mixture of lentils, bulgur, nuts, and herbs. I have taken a few liberties with the recipe dictated to me by my friend Hamdi, a second-hand electronics dealer, avid hunter, and amateur culinary historian whom I met on my first visit to Tokat city. I’ve eliminated some of the liquid to make the dish more salad-like, and I’ve increased the amount of fresh herbs that make it exuberantly flavorful.
Every cook in Tokat has his or her own favorite herb combination for this dish; the variety of herbs and greens increases in spring when city dwellers head to the hills outside Tokat to forage. You can play with the herb mix to incorporate what’s in season at the market or in your own garden.
In Tokat, the salad is made with small local lentils; French green lentils are a good substitute. Let the dish rest for at least an hour before serving it with crisp lettuce leaves and/or blanched grape leaves for wrapping. I also like it as a side for baked salmon or roast chicken.
Preparation time: 40 minutes, plus at least 1 hour resting time
Serves 6 to 8
- For the salad
- 4 cups water
- 1½ teaspoons fine sea salt
- 1 cup Le Puy lentils
- ⅓ cup coarse bulgur
- 2 Anaheim or other mild green chiles, stemmed, seeded, and coarsely chopped
- 1 large ripe tomato, halved crosswise and grated on a box grater
- 1½ packed cups mixed fresh herbs and greens, such as dill, parsley, mint, purple or Italian basil, chervil, arugula, and/or purslane
- 4 scallions, white and green parts, thinly sliced
- 1½ cups walnuts, coarsely chopped
- 1½ teaspoons Turkish or other crushed red pepper flakes, or to taste (optional)
- For the dressing
- 2 tablespoons tomato paste
- 3 tablespoons olive oil
- 1½ teaspoons fine sea salt, or to taste
1. Cook the lentils and bulgur: Bring the water to a boil in a medium saucepan and add 1 teaspoon of the salt. Add the lentils and cook, partly covered, at a steady simmer, until they are almost done (softish outside but firm in the center), about 15 minutes. Stir in the bulgur and cook until it is tender, another 10 minutes or so. Drain the lentils and bulgur and transfer to a large bowl.
2. While the lentils and bulgur are cooking, make the dressing: Stir together the tomato paste, olive oil, and remaining ½ teaspoon salt in a small bowl until smooth.
3. Pour the dressing over the warm lentils and bulgur and toss to coat. Let cool to room temperature.
4. Add the chiles, tomato, herbs, scallions, walnuts, and red pepper flakes, if using, to the lentils and bulgur. Toss, taste, and adjust for salt if necessary. Set aside for at least an hour, or up to 4 hours, before serving.
Tomato & White Bean Stew:
This stew of tender white beans and chunks of meat in a rich tomato sauce is found all over Turkey, but I associate it most closely with Istanbul, where it is so popular that some restaurants serve nothing but.
Feel free, as cooks in Turkey do, to tinker with the recipe. My interpretation, a mash-up of all those I’ve eaten over the years, calls for cannellini or borlotti beans, but you can use any white bean (cooking times will vary). My preference is for lamb, but you can use beef, or omit the meat. In the eastern Black Sea city of Rize, this stew is extravagantly buttery. You can replicate that version by eliminating the ground chiles, substituting more tomato paste for the pepper paste, and using butter instead of oil. If you want your stew soupy, increase the water.
Plan to soak the beans overnight. In Turkey, this is served over a mound of Rice and Orzo Pilaf.
Preparation time: 1¼ to 3 hours (depending on the type and age of the dried beans), plus an overnight soak for the beans
Serves 4 to 6 as a main course
- ½ cup olive or vegetable oil
- 2 medium onions, chopped (about 2 cups)
- 4 garlic cloves, chopped
- 2 medium tomatoes, halved crosswise and grated on a box grater, or one 14-ounce can diced tomatoes
- ¼ cup tomato paste
- 1 tablespoon sweet or hot Turkish red pepper paste (optional)
- 1 teaspoon ground dried chiles
- 4 ounces lean boneless lamb or beef, cut into ½-inch pieces
- 2½ cups dried cannellini or borlotti beans, soaked overnight and drained
- 5 to 6 cups hot water, or as needed
- 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
- 1½ teaspoons sugar
- 1½ teaspoons fine sea salt
- Turkish or regular crushed red pepper flakes, for serving
- For the dough
- ¾ cup water
- 1 tablespoon instant yeast
- 4¾ cups (26⅛ ounces) bread flour, plus additional for kneading and rolling out the dough
- 1 cup sugar
- 1½ teaspoons fine sea salt
- 2 large eggs
- ¾ cup vegetable oil
- For the filling
- 2½ cups tahini, plus more if needed
- ¼ cup plus 2 teaspoons sugar
- For the wash
- 1 egg
- 1 teaspoon water
- Pinch of fine sea salt
- 1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon untoasted white sesame seeds
- 2 teaspoons sugar
1.
Heat the oil in a 5-quart pot over medium-low heat. Add the onions and garlic and cook until the onions are soft, about 8 minutes; do not let them color.
2.
Add the tomatoes, tomato paste, pepper paste, if using, and ground chiles. Reduce the heat to low and cook, stirring to coat the onions, until the tomatoes and chiles are fragrant and the oil begins to separate out about 5 minutes. Add the lamb and cook until it loses its pink color.
3.
Add the beans and enough hot water to cover the beans by about 1½ inches. Stir in the lemon juice, sugar, and salt and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat, partially cover the pot, and simmer slowly until the beans are soft but not disintegrating—depending on the size and age of the beans, this could take anywhere from 1 to 2½ hours. Check and stir the stew occasionally to make sure that the beans aren’t sticking and there is sufficient liquid to keep them partially submerged; add more hot water ½ cup at a time if necessary. When the stew is ready, there should be enough slightly thickened sauce to submerge about one-third of the beans.
4. Serve the stew hot, passing red pepper flakes at the table.
In these lightly sweet bread coils, which are eaten for breakfast or as a snack, with tea, layers of tender buttery dough conceal pockets of rich, nutty sesame paste. My touchstone for this treat has long been the version from Yedi Sekiz Hasan Paşa, a bakery in Beşiktaş district, on Istanbul’s European side, that dates back to the latter years of the Ottoman Empire. There the pastries are bigger than the palm of my hand and heavy with sesame paste. Veysel Büyüksolak, a young pastry chef at Istanbul’s Nicole restaurant, gave helpful advice when I attempted to replicate the buns at home.
To create the flaky layers, a circle of dough drizzled with tahini is rolled into a rope, which is in turn twisted before being coiled. In Turkey, pastry chefs and home cooks use an oklava, a long, thin rolling pin, to roll and stretch their dough. You can buy an oklava, which is also useful for making plain pastry dough online, or use a 20-inch piece of wooden dowel or light metal piping instead. For those with little patience for rolling dough, I’ve also included directions for making buns that are smaller, plumper, and less flaky but no less delicious.
The dough ropes may leak a bit of tahini when they are stretched, twisted, and coiled. Just wipe the sesame paste from your workspace with your finger and smear it over the dough; the oil will leave a desirable sheen on the pastry.
These buns keep for up to 5 days and freeze well. They’re best warm: Wrap in foil and reheat in a 350°F oven.
Preparation time: 1¾ hours, plus 1-hour rising time
Makes 8 buns; each serves 1 or 2
1. Make the dough: To mix in a stand mixer, Put the water in a large bowl and sprinkle the yeast over it. Whisk together the flour, sugar, and salt in another bowl.
2.
Beat the eggs and oil together in a small bowl, add to the yeast mixture, and stir lightly to combine. Add the dry ingredients and use your hands or a dough scraper to mix and cut the ingredients together. When the mass comes together, it will be sticky and oily; turn it out onto an unfloured surface and knead, adding up to 2 tablespoons of flour, 2 teaspoons at a time, as necessary, until the dough is smooth and only slightly tacky, about 8 minutes. Transfer the dough to an unoiled bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let rise until it has increased in size by half, 30 to 45 minutes.
3. Turn the dough out onto an unfloured work surface and divide it into 8 roughly equal pieces. Roll each piece into a ball, cover with plastic wrap or an upturned bowl, and let rest for 15 minutes.
4. Place the racks in the upper and lower thirds of the oven and heat the oven to 400°F.
5. Assemble the pastries: Lightly flour a large work surface. Place a dough ball on the surface and roll it out to an approximately 10-inch circle. If you started with a regular rolling pin, switch to an oklava or other long pin (see headnote). Lightly flour the bottom third of the dough and the pin. Place the pin at the top edge of the dough and roll the dough up around the pin as you move it toward you. Stop after every second or third rotation of the pin, lightly place your palms side by side at the center of the pin, and roll it back and forth beneath your palms as you move your hands away from each other along its length. Use a light touch and roll in short strokes. You should feel and see the dough stretching. Continue rolling the dough up onto the pin and stopping to stretch it until it is completely wrapped around the pin. Lift up the pin, flour the work surface again, and carefully unroll the dough onto the surface, turned 90 degrees from its original orientation. Don’t be discouraged if the dough is not a perfect circle, or if it is not much larger than when you started; this just means that you need to apply more pressure to the pin as you roll it out again. If the dough sticks to itself, flour it a bit more heavily before rolling it onto the pin again. Repeat this technique—wrapping the dough around the pin and turning it 90 degrees each time—as many times as necessary to achieve a very thin circle at least 16 and up to 20 inches in diameter. If, when you’ve finished rolling the dough, it’s thicker in some spots than in others, use the rolling pin to even it out. Work your way around the dough circle, lifting the edges to the center to make sure it doesn’t stick, gently stretching the dough as you do so. Be sure not to tear it.
6.
Distribute ¼ cup plus 1 tablespoon of the tahini over the dough circle. The easiest way to do this is to scoop up a tablespoonful at a time, hold the spoon a foot or so above the dough, and move your hand as you tilt the spoon. Don’t skip the edges of the dough—if you end up with some tahini on your work surface, just use your finger to dab it up and smear it on the dough—and don’t worry about unevenly distributed tahini. Sprinkle 1¾ teaspoons of the sugar over the tahini.
7.
Roll the dough up into a rope. The rope needn’t be perfect, and it shouldn’t be too tight, but try to keep it as thin as possible. If once you’ve rolled the dough into a rope, you find that tahini has leaked out, just wipe it up with your fingers and gently spread it over the outside of the rope.
8.
Lay the rope on your work surface parallel to your body. Starting in the center of the rope, with your hands about 8 inches apart, pick up the rope and move it gently up and down while gently tugging on it; it will begin to stretch. Repeat this motion several times, working on different sections of the rope, until it is 3 to 3½ feet long. Alternatively, if in Step 5 you opted to work with a smaller circle of dough, your rope should be about 1½ feet long after stretching. (To complete this step on a smaller work surface, loop the rope back on itself several times and work on a small section at a time.) As you work, try to keep the rope equally thick along its length.
9.
Now twist the rope: Place the palm or fingers of your left hand on the rope about 1 foot in from its right end and, holding that bit of the rope in place, twist it with your right hand. Don’t twist so tightly that the rope curls in on itself, but the twist marks should be visible. Repeat, working your way down the rope, until it is twisted along its entire length.
10.
Line two baking sheets with parchment paper. Form the rope into a loose coil on one of the sheets, leaving an ⅛-inch gap between each ring of the spiral coil. Tuck the end of the rope underneath the outer edge of the coil. With your palm or the heel of your hand, gently press down on the coil to join, but not fuse, its rings. Lay a damp towel over the pastry while you use the rest of the dough to make 7 more coils, distributing them between the two baking sheets and covering with a damp towel as you finish them.
11.
Make the wash: Beat the egg with the water and salt in a small bowl and brush the surface of the buns with it. Sprinkle ¼ tea spoon of the sugar and ½ teaspoon of the sesame seeds over each one. Bake until the buns are walnut colored, 16 to 20 minutes, switching the baking sheets from top to bottom and front to back at the halfway point.
12.
Transfer the baked buns to a wire rack and let cool for at least 20 minutes before serving. Once cooled completely, the buns can be wrapped well in plastic wrap and stored for up to 5 days or frozen for up to 1 month.
To Mix Bread Dough in a Stand Mixer :
Mix the dry ingredients (plus spices, if included) in the bowl of a stand mixer. Mix the yeast with the water (plus any other liquids, yogurt, and/or eggs, if included) in a separate bowl. Pour the liquids over the dry ingredients.
Attach a dough hook to the machine. Mix on low speed until the dough begins to come together, then increase the speed to medium. Knead the dough until it reaches the consistency described in the recipe (smooth and elastic, or smooth and slightly tacky), 5 to 10 minutes, depending on the recipe. Stop the the machine as needed to scrape the dough from the hook. (If, after 5 minutes of kneading, the dough is still sticking to the bowl, add flour, 1 scant tablespoon at a time, kneading for 30 seconds after each addition, to bring the dough to the proper consistency.) Turn the dough onto a work surface, form it into a ball, and transfer to a lightly oiled bowl.
Mix the dry ingredients (plus spices, if included) in the bowl of a stand mixer. Mix the yeast with the water (plus any other liquids, yogurt, and/or eggs, if included) in a separate bowl. Pour the liquids over the dry ingredients.
Attach a dough hook to the machine. Mix on low speed until the dough begins to come together, then increase the speed to medium. Knead the dough until it reaches the consistency described in the recipe (smooth and elastic, or smooth and slightly tacky), 5 to 10 minutes, depending on the recipe. Stop the the machine as needed to scrape the dough from the hook. (If, after 5 minutes of kneading, the dough is still sticking to the bowl, add flour, 1 scant tablespoon at a time, kneading for 30 seconds after each addition, to bring the dough to the proper consistency.) Turn the dough onto a work surface, form it into a ball, and transfer to a lightly oiled bowl.
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