In This Installment:

Heirloom Bulgur Wheat from Turkey

Tabbouleh Recipe

Mango Pineapple Habanero Chile Jam from Vermont

Spicy Portuguesa Pizza with Eggs, Ham & Olives Recipe

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Heirloom Bulgur Wheat from Turkey

Over the last six months or so, my cohort Alex Hall-Ruiz and I have been chatting with Serdar Sinaci. His company—Kōy Pantry—works with small producers throughout Turkey to bring their traditional foods here to the States. (Spoiler alert: we’ll be featuring their Pepper Paste this fall. It’s sweet, intense, and packed with red pepper flavor like a tomate paste or strattu from Italy, only peppers.)

Over the past few months we’ve had the chance to taste and consider a number of their products and I really enjoyed this Heirloom Bulgur Wheat. It’s an ancient variety of wheat called Karakilcik and it’s been cultivated in the area since the 1700s using the same techniques, which are quite different than milling wheat till it’s a flour.

Here, the wheat berries are partially boiled right after harvesting, then they’re dried in the sun and cracked into smaller pieces to be used later in dishes like kibbeh or in salads or tabbouleh, which is perfect this time of year.

Here’s Kōy Pantry’s recipe for Tabbouleh. I tested it out and it’s great. Get what you can from your local market and enjoy this summer salad:

Tabbouleh with Heirloom Bulgur Wheat

Ingredients

• 1 cup fine Koy bulgur
• 2 bunches parsley, finely chopped
• 1 bunch mint, finely chopped
• 1 Persian cucumber or 1/2 English cucumber, peeled and chopped
• 4 whole scallions, chopped
• 2 tomatoes, chopped
• 1 lemons juiced and zested
• 1/4 to 1 cup extra-virgin olive oil

Instructions

• Put the bulgur in a bowl and add 1 cup of boiling hot water, cover with plastic wrap and let sit for at least 10 minutes. After 10 minutes, uncover and fluff with a fork.
• Add cucumbers, parsley,  mint, scallions and tomatoes to the bulgur.
• Add lemon juice and zest, olive oil, salt and pepper to taste.
• Mix well, taste, and adjust the seasoning and olive oil as needed.

Mango Pineapple Habanero Chile Jam from Vermont

Our friends at Blake Hill in Windsor, Vermont have been making English-style marmalades and preserves since 2009. I’m a big fan of their Meyer Lemon & Honey Marmalade—among other products like their roasted garlic spread—so I shouldn’t be surprised I was wowed by this award winning jam the first time I tasted it. I also had to have a sip of something to quench the heat because there is definitely a big kick of heat going on in this jam. You can thank the habanero chiles for that. They source the chiles locally, but they don’t grow mangoes and pineapples in Vermont so those come from more exoctic locations. It’s the mixing of the spicy hot with the juicy sweet that makes this jam sing and it hits way more notes than just the high ones.

A jam like this isn’t meant for your morning toast (though there might be a handful of you out there who think that sounds like a great idea), but it’s incredibly useful in the kitchen…you just have to start thinking outside the box or aim your culinary focus on cuisines from southeast Asia where chiles and fruits mix together to create signature flavors for signature dishes all the time.

It’s great on seafood or mixed with sour cream to make a topping for fish tacos. Or Mix it into your own “salsa fresca” with your own tomatoes, green pepers, onions, and cilantro all chopped up and tossed togther. But in perusing Blake Hill’s recipe suggestions (and they have a lot of suggestions) I found one for a “Spicy Portuguese Pizza” that sounds amazing and is well within our capabilities as home cooks. Even if you don’t have a pizza stone or an outdoor pizza oven, this is gonna be a recipe you’ll want to keep in your rolodex.

Spicy Pizza Portuguesa with Eggs, Ham & Olives

Ingredients