When I’m watching Turkish historical dramas, or any TV show for that matter, I often hit pause to have a closer look at what people are eating.1 In shows like Diriliş: Ertuğrul and Kuruluş: Osman (set in late 13th-century Anatolia, see picture) you see a lot of roasted lamb and chicken, the ubiquitous Turkish soups, köfte and helva, and green onions dipped in salt. Although a lot of bread is eaten (always broken by the host with a “bismillahirrahmanirrahim” at the start of the meal) the staple food is usually bulgur.
So what is bulgur? The Wikipedia page is pretty sparse; this ScienceDirect topic page has better info. If you’d rather watch a video, then I’d recommend this one by celebrity Turkish chef Refika Birgül, which includes a recipe for bulgur pilaf.
Bulgur is a wheat-based product that’s been pre-cooked, then dried until some of the outer bran flakes off for easy removal. From that ScienceDirect link above, per-capita consumption in Türkiye is 20-30 kg/annum, which equates to ~40-80 g per day. Thats quite a lot, as from personal experience I can confirm it’s very filling (high satiety). Although Türkiye is the world’s major producer, I was surprised to learn how much had been made in the USA, to use up the post-war wheat surplus:2
Bulgur is sent from the United States to countries in the Far East as part of the programme of American aid to famine areas. In 1971, 227,000 tonne of bulgur were produced in the United States, of which 5% was used domestically, the remainder being used in the Foods for Peace Program. […] Bulgur provided a cheap food that was acceptable because it could be cooked in the same way as rice and superficially resembled it.
The Kuruluş: Osman staple is less complicated than Refika’s recipe; it’s more like a simple bulgur + meat combo, as in the picture.
Much as I’d like to cook a bulgur pilaf, I’m unfortunately limited by raw ingredients; the larger-size3 bulgur grains simply aren’t available in supermarkets near me. I have only recently become aware of this somewhat local supplier (Pennisi’s in Woolloongabba) who seem to have everything I would need, so stay tuned for a pilaf recipe replication in the future.
I did however find a supermarket that stocked Duru’s “Brown Fine (Çiğ Köftelik) Bulgur ”, which gets its brown colour from the varieties of wheat used. Their website states that “Brown fine bulgur is preferred to be used when preparing kibbeh, due to its elasticity compared to yellow bulgur”. Who am I to argue with this? Let’s try it with Refika’s içli köfte (kibbeh) recipe!
In short, this worked very well; the recipe is highly recommended. There were a couple of differences worth talking about in case anyone wants to have a go themselves.
First, does it make a difference that I bought the brown bulgur, when Refika obviously uses the yellow type? What’s the actual difference between them? Duru claims the brown bulgur has better “elasticity”, which sounds like a gluten thing to me. Checking their website for nutritional info: yes, the brown has 7.2 g of protein per 60 g serving (12% w/w), and the yellow has a little less at 6.6 g (11% w/w). You can see that Refika actually bumps up the gluten a bit, by adding semolina (supposedly 13% protein). Maybe then, added semolina isn’t strictly necessary if you’re working with a higher-protein bulgur, but I added it anyway and it worked really nicely.
More on semolina: I had both a coarse and a fine grade of semolina available. Based on the theorised role of the semolina I went with the fine grade, hoping for easy access to the gluten with less kneading.
Even so, the kneading took a long time to reach the non-cracking stage (~2h with my stand mixer). I didn’t have that lovely paddle-blade that Refika recommends,4 and had to do it using twin spiral dough-hooks instead. I had to add maybe half a kilo of ice over this time, up from the 150 g she gives as a starting point, but it was all absorbed in the end so this is probably just how much water the brown bulgur needed.
I think I could have added the ice a bit faster, even without a better mixer. Remember what we are trying to do here: the ice provides water to re-hydrate the already-cooked starch in the bulgur, and the kneading develops the gluten structure to hold it all together. In raw wheat, uncooked starch is tightly packed in crystalline form in granules that are pretty much impervious to water, but heat it above its gelatinisation temperature of 60-70°C and all those neatly coiled amylose chains will explode out of the granules and form a gel with water. No matter how much you let them relax and cool before you dry them out again, like a box of old computer cables they will never spontaneously go back to the nice coiled form.5 Now you can re-hydrate the tangled, uncoiled (amorphous) starch at low temperature just by adding cold water (or ice in this case, to keep the meat cold). Note in this recipe the semolina is gelatinised with hot water before you add it, so there’s no uncooked starch added at all.6 I was adding ice 50 g at a time (2 cubes) and waiting until it had mostly melted before adding more, but if I did this again I would definitely double that rate, or even more at the start, and them maybe slow down so as not to overshoot the end-point too much.
The final dough was quite remarkable. As I’ve said before, I really appreciate Youtube videos when it comes to making dough, as a picture tells a thousand words about the consistency you’re aiming for. This stuff resembles potter’s clay, both in the slightly wet texture, and in the way that it heals seamlessly from damage; if you accidentally poke your finger through the dough as you’re forming the köfte shells you can just smooth it back together without a trace. I’d encourage you then to make the walls of the shells as thin as possible for extra crispiness; keep going until you think it’s thin enough, and then continue on a bit thinner. I can’t imagine how complicated the dough structure is here; is the minced meat present as muscle fibres, individual cells, or some unholy mixture? And what contribution do meat structural proteins like collagen and elastin make to the dough form?
Refika calls these içli köfte “one of the best foods in the world”, and I think I understand what she is getting at. They were delicious of course, but there was also a certain fragrance lingering on my fingertips after I ate these. While drinking tea after dinner (and watching Turkish TV) I kept catching a whiff from my fingers. The smell was there again after I ate leftovers, and I can imagine how addictive this smell could be if it were also associated with memories from your childhood, your grandmother’s cooking, that sort of thing.
Note: I don’t remember ever seeing içli köfte depicted on Ertuğrul or Osman. If you’re looking out for them, don’t be caught out by the false friends in this screenshot: this is helva (a sweet dessert), not köfte.
If you want to see how helva is made, this woman may not caramelise hers quite as much as in the above screenshot, but she definitely has the knack of shaping that 3-fold rotational symmetry with a spoon (at about 3:15):
They don’t let me into the lab much these days, so cooking is the next best thing. As Derek Lowe says, “never trust an organic chemist who can’t cook”.
Kurt A. Rosentrater, A.D. Evers, in Kent's Technology of Cereals (Fifth Edition), 2018
To make something like in the picture, I would probably buy the coarsest grades, either “başbaşı” size (whole grains) or “iri pilavlık” (~half grains). Plenty of online pilaf recipes call for the #3 “pilavlık” grade, though, and it seems to be more commonly available.
Refika seems to have sponsorship from that Arçelik brand, but the mixers actually look really cool. Price at 7949 TL (about 600 AUD at time of writing) for the model with the die-cast (döküm) metal body; something similar from KitchenAid would cost you about a thousand AUD. Postage from Türkiye would probably make up the difference though…
It’s more complicated than this (when is biology ever simple?) since in addition to amylose the granules also contain amylopectin. See here for a little more detail.
Before the flour is added in the final stage, that is.