Our Saturday Night Dinner: Final Photo

Here is the final outlook of our dinner table with two traditional Anatolian dishes "tirit" and " keşkek," as well as classical shepherd salad, arugula-feta salad and dates with cream and walnuts:

Our Saturday Night Dinner: "Keşkek"

I was ten when my older uncle got married. The wedding day was a bright sunny day with very little sleep for me as it was for the preceding week because of the hectic wedding preparations, such as accommodating guests coming from out of town, organizing the official ceremony, arranging transportation and logistics for wedding band, inviting people in and out of town, and so on… Finally, it was the time for the big feast where we were supposed to serve 7-8 different dishes over a thousand guests witnessing my uncle’s and aunt-in-law's wedding. One of the traditional dishes we prepared and served that day was keşkek (mashed wheat with beef). I recall myself observing every little detail about its preparation; yet, after two decades of chaotic, nomadic, and terribly cumbersome living conditions I’ve experienced, most of those memories got blurred. Nevertheless, we tried to cook keşkek at home depending mostly on my intact reminiscences about taste of that wedding keşkek, and partially on online recipes.

Ingredients (four servings):

 
* 200 gr wheat (preferably shelled)
* 400 gr Soup Bone or Lamb Shoulder/Chops (bone is needed for the broth)
* 2 tbsp butter
* 1 tbsp red pepper flakes
* 1 tbsp paprika
* Salt
* Water
 

We purchased the wheat from World Harvest in Champaign, IL. I think Ziyad is the only brand that they carry for the wheat. Duyguzela had already told the story about the soup bone. I used the meat falling off the soup bone as the meat ingredient in keşkek. Lamb meat is preferred in certain regions, but in Aydin (Western Anatolia), we always prepare this dish with beef. Butter, red pepper flakes and paprika are from Turkey--the former two we bought here, and paprika my mom made and sent us. 

Preparation: 

Soak the wheat overnight. If you lack time, or you forget, you can increase the boiling time to compensate for it. Before boiling the wheat, wash it a couple of times, until the water is clear. Then, boil it until the wheat is tender. We boiled it for almost 3 hours, just to make sure it was “mashable”;) Then, I continually stirred and mashed the boiled wheat while Duyguzela gradually added almost half a liter of soup bone broth over an hour period until the wheat took the following form

Mashed Wheat

I remember that there were more than 10 adult men stirring and mashing a cauldron full of wheat while a cook interrupted this process and added a huge bowl of beef broth at every single visit. After an hour of hard-core stirring and mashing process, I now can tell why there were so many men then. I used to complain to my mom about how rare she cooked keşkek for us, and, now, I do understand. It requires quite a lot of physical strength mainly because the boiled wheat gets thicker and stickier while mashing, and you get more tired;))

Letting the mashed wheat and myself rest a little bit, I pinched the boiled beef from the soup bone into fibrous pieces as shown in the following photo:

Pinched Beef

Pinching it into smaller pieces helps the mashing and mixing with the mashed wheat. I tasted some versions of keşkek with only mashed wheat and lump or stew meat on top. However, I prefer the mixture, as it is served at wedding ceremonies: it provides a decent texture and the meat flavor is equally distributed around the mashed wheat. Yet, this requires another hour of mashing;((

Hence, after adding the meat and salt, we continued the mashing process for another hour or so. At the end of this process, the keşkek was ready in the following form

Mashed Wheat with Beef

Finally, we melted the butter and added the paprika on it. And, poured the sizzling butter sauce on a plate of keşkek as follows:

Keskek with the Sauce

Afiyet olsun!

Our Saturday Night Dinner: Salads and Sweets

Both tirit and keşkek that we cooked this weekend were very tasty, as well as nutritious. However, I should admit that tirit and keşkek are very strong and a little bit heavy dishes, as both of them contained broth, wheat/bread, red meat and butter. . Hence, two of these in one dinner table had to be accompanied by salads with proper veggies and dressing.

While considering salads, I had two things in mind: to have something fresh and refreshing, and have some acidity instead of any other kind of oil--including olive oil which we use literally all the time. I prepared two salad dishes while Melih was beating the wheat-meat mixture of keşkek hard with his strong muscles (I just wanna make sure that he's gonna do the same thing the other times we cook keşkek:) ).

The first salad I prepared was very similar to the Turkish çoban salatası (shepherd’s salad) which is made of onions, tomatoes, cucumber and peppers. Each ingredient is chopped finely and mixed with lemon, olive oil and some salt. In my version of çoban salatası, I decided not to put any onions this time, since I did not want to mix the smell and the taste of the broth with the onion's. It was totally my individual decision, but I think it worked well. Also, this time we had cherry tomatoes at home. I used them instead of the regular tomatoes by chopping into two. Cucumber was the freshest ingredient just picked up from our little backyard garden. As for the peppers, we prefer a nearby organic farm called Pontius Farm. There, you actually can pickup several types of peppers--hot, mild, bell, jalapeno--when they are not grown too big. Even in the once in a week farmers' market here, not to mention the big grocery stores, the peppers are always too big. I prefer them in finger-length for the salads. So, I chopped the delicious, finger-length Pontius Farm peppers (about 4 mild 1 hot) into our çoban salata. I finally added some chopped parsley on the top. Although we usually add lots of olive oil to the salads--basically we pour olive oil to the salads--this time we only put some lemon and a little bit salt. So the fresh and acidic çoban salatası was ready to eat.

For some reason, I avoided the strong taste of onion in the salad, but I actually preferred arugula. Maybe it is because onion does not have the freshness that arugula has. I washed the arugula--also from our precious backyard garden; I chopped it finely; put it into the plate and added some crumbled feta cheese on the top. It was Melih's idea to add a little bit plum vinegar to the arugula-feta plate. The plum vinegar provided a perfect acidity and extra freshness. Again for this one, I did not put any olive oil. Since it was an instantaneous idea, I have no idea if our arugula salad has a name. Though, it was the most refreshing dish on our table.



















As for the sweets, after eating everything we cooked, I had this "inclination," this "tendency" for something sweet, but I was not at all in the mood to go with fatty and very sugary deserts. Dates were the perfect matches for this sort of craving for sweets. They are not too sweet, not fatty, very light and extremely delicious. They are maybe the most refreshing sweet that one can eat since a date is a fruit. Also, they contain lots of fiber, so are very good for digestion. Due to the fact that we are currently in Ramadan--the holy month for Muslims--we have lots of dates in our Middle Eastern grocery store in Champaign. (Dates are particularly consumed in this month during fasting) Dates are not too sweet for me, but I still wanted to lighten their taste after the tirit and keşkek dinner. One thing that I always do is to eat dates with some walnuts inside--imagine the energy I get. This time, after putting a piece of walnut inside my date (by the way, walnuts are from my grandmothers' gardens;)), I also added a little bit of the cream from the Brown Cow brand yogurt. Note that I would never put the so-called creams sold in the markets on the top of my dates. Well, since I never buy, I do not really know if there is a really good and once which is content- and taste-wise similar to the kind of cream I like. In general, I find the usual cream very oily, meaninglessly light in texture and tasteless. A little piece of cream from the top of my yogurt is a perfect choice. Eventually, this date-walnut-cream combination was an amazing, such an awesome taste. Both walnut and the cream made the sweetness of date lighter in different ways. It was just a perfect match. I think I ate like 9 of them at once.. After that huge dinner.. Imagine.. I think my strong stomach also had some important role here ;)

Words of My Stomach

Some people might find the dishes we cook heavy and greasy. As for the weights we gain, I believe that when we eat the so called low caloric and tasteless food, we never feel actually full. As we keep on eating and eating more the "low caloric" food to feel full, we make our stomachs upset. Moreover, we put on weight anyway for eating a lot. Just feed yourself with good food, and make your stomach happy. We need fat, too.

As for comfort, if anyone concerns about just feeling bad after eating so much fat, note that eating "good food" do not make you feel bad. I can actually sleep like babies after this dinner--and it is not only tirit, but we also had keşkek and salads and sweets. Coming soon!!

The key here, of course, is to find the quality food, especially the quality fat. It is not really possible to find the veggies, or the lamb and kettle which are quality-wise equal to the ones grown up in the Anatolian mountains. But still there are things could be done. We constantly avoid processed market meat, especially anything possibly containing the GMO. We prefer the once in a week farmers' market during the summers and our local organic food store for the rest of the year. We also have a little garden in our backyard where we have cucumbers, tomatoes, arugula, parsley, basil, eggplants and snow peas.

I was grown up with the stories about my mom's grandfather who used to eat animal fat just like that, and drink melted butter with honey even when he was 95 years old. He lived a healthy life throughout these years. His stomach was happy, so is mine :)

Our Saturday Night Dinner: Adventure Starts with "Tirit"

As of today, Melih and I are proud of trying--both in terms of cooking and eating--two very old and traditional dishes of Anatolia, tirit and keşkek. Neither tirit nor keşkek belongs to a specific city or geographical area, rather one can find these dishes in several parts of Anatolia.

However, the methods that the locals of different places apply in preparation usually vary from region to region. Although each difference is a new and exciting taste, in this blog, we try to prioritize, at least to start with, the most authentic--usually means simpler--way of cooking. We will concentrate on the main ingredients of the ancient dishes, and see their function and meaning both for the plate, and for the people bounded by their own natural sources, economics and ways of living. Trying the variations will be our following challenge after realizing the "authentic taste" in our contemporary Midwest.

Let's start with tirit. A Persian word tirit could mean broth or be referred to the old dish we just cooked. Tirit is cooked parts of the Blacks Sea, Marmara and Aegean regions, as well as the inland Anatolia. When I searched for the recipe, although the mentality of the dish is the same everywhere, I found several ways of cooking it, with different, or more and less ingredients. We decided to go with the plain one which is cooked in the Kastamonu city of Turkey for centuries. Our priority is to understand the taste and function of the main ingredients of tirit. Since every single ingredient has a great importance in the dishes we will cook, as it is the way in the villages they were made, we constantly look for the most natural food available in our town.

The ingredients of tirit are quite limited, and the recipe is more than simple.


Ingredients (for two people):


* 2 plain bagel (original is "Kastamonu bagel" which is made in the local bakeries)
* Broth (out of 1 pound of soup bone)
* Garlic (2 big 3 normal size cloves of garlic)
* Plain yogurt (1 cup)
* Ground beef (1/2 pound)
* 3 tablespoons of butter
* Paprika, red chilly pepper, cumin, black pepper, salt (depending on the taste)


Discussion of ingredients:

First of all, I believe that for this particular dish, the amounts of the ingredients used should be left to the individual taste. Some could like it with more broth, or some could like it with less yogurt, etc..


Among the ingredients above, the only thing that we really do not have here is the Kastamonu bagel. I considered cooking it myself, but still, since we do not have a proper bakery oven as they do, it is never going to be the same. So, I looked for the alternatives. Usual bagels seemed a good substitute. As another alternative, I also tried Italian ciabatta bread.



Broth is maybe the most important ingredient of tirit. It gives the major flavor itself and by mixing with the other ingredients, yields to different tastes. So, we went to our once in a week farmers market on Saturday, and purchased a pound of "soup bone" and same amount of ground beef from our usual farmer. The soup bone is a whole with the morrow inside, the bone in the middle and the meat outside. When something is both organic and local at the same time, you should expect a better taste besides a healthy nutrition. Well, you could use the artificial broths from the markets, too, but it will never be the same.


As for the yogurt, we always prefer organic whole milk yogurts. I actually cannot have the taste of yogurt with the low fat or fat free ones. I think that to have the taste, I usually eat more from those light products, so nothing changes in terms of calories. Our favorite brands are Stonyfield and Brown Cow. I loved Stonyfield more when it had the one inch thick cream on the top. Unfortunately, it is not like that, anymore. Nowadays, I go with Brown Cow for the cream.



Finally, please use real butter. Margarine is a processed, artificial food. It is not good for your health; it is not tasty, either. There is basically no need to have such unnecessary stuff at home. See the following page for a simple but coherent comparison between the two: http://dailydietitian.com/2010/08/25/butter-vs-margarine/

Here, I am able to find a Turkish brand butter from a Middle Eastern market in the town, and this is what I used in this dish. Even the big markets have real and organic butter, so it should not be a concern to find it here.



How to cook tirit:

Cooking tirit is really very easy. We even thought that tirit could be consumed as a fast food--maybe this was a little too ambitious, I accept.

Well, you should start with boiling the soup bone. You really have to boil it so much, maybe 2 or 3 hours, that the meat must separate from the bone automatically by itself. Now, one could say that how then it is a fast food after boiling some ingredient for 3 hours, but consider you boiled a lot of soup bone and have enough broth in the fridge for 6 more tirit! So you can make it as a one time thing. Also you do not need to be taking care of the dish while it is being boiled. Just check for the water once in an hour. For tirit, we only need the broth. This time, we used the meats from the soup bone for the keşkek, but you can consume it anyway you wish.

The local people cooking tirit and many other dishes do not really use spices. I think the reason lies in the fact that first, locals tend to prefer simple ways of preparing dishes, and second, they are not in the need of a favor from the spices, since the ingredients they use are extremely delicious anyway. They probably do not need cumin for the meat of the grass-fed animal, eating probably the most delicious thyme leaves in the world. Still, as a spice-lover, it was so hard for me to not to add anything except salt into the broth.

Having hot and lightly salted broth, now that you could make small pieces from the bagel/or ciabatta and put them into the oven until the time they get really dry.

Once they are dry--be careful, not burned--put them into a plate and add some broth up until the pieces bagels are almost all wet. Do not hesitate to put more if you are a broth lover.

On a separate bowl, mix the yogurt with finely diced garlic, and pour it on the top of the bagels.

On a pan, cook the ground beef without adding any additional oil. I just could not help myself to put some cumin and black pepper, along with just a little salt. Hence, put the totally cooked ground beef on the top of the plate.

Finally, melt the butter in a small pan with some paprika and red chilly pepper, and add it to your plate.

Your original, ancient Kastamonu tirit is ready to eat. Enjoy!

Some final remarks:

* I loved the tirit we cooked. I think that I will cook more soup bones next time to refrigerate the left over broth.
* The bagel/bread in the bottom should be somewhat hard. I actually loved the ciabatta version more than the bagel version, but not the soft parts of ciabatta which became so soft and wet with the broth and yogurt. So the next time, I could try it only with the crusty part of the ciabatta. Melih liked bagel more, though. Both plates were very delicious, anyway.
* In some places, they make tirit with chicken broth which is also worth trying.
* Again, in some places, they also use onions, tomatoes, and several other veggies for the topping, as well as cooked stew meat instead of the ground beef. Why not?