Kısır

Don't Make These Mistakes

Fine bulgur, not coarse. Coarse bulgur needs cooking and gives a completely different salad.

Mix it with your hands. It genuinely tastes different from a spoon-stirred version.

Add the wet vegetables last, and only what you will eat that day — they water it down overnight.

Making Kısır

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1. Put the bulgur in a large bowl, pour the boiling water over, cover with a plate and leave 20 minutes until the water is absorbed and the grain is tender.

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2. Fluff it with a fork and let it cool to just warm.

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3. Add the pepper paste, tomato purée, olive oil, pomegranate molasses, lemon juice, salt, Aleppo pepper and cumin.

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4. Work it all through with your hands for 2 minutes, squeezing the mixture through your fingers until the grain is evenly red.

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5. Fold in the parsley, mint, spring onions, tomato and cucumber.

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6. Taste and adjust — it should be sour, salty and only mildly hot.

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7. Serve with the lettuce leaves for scooping and the pomegranate seeds scattered over.

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Related guide: Prep, cook and total time.

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What's Going On Here

The bulgur is soaked in hot water rather than boiled, and only just enough to swell it — drowned, it goes to porridge. Everything is then worked in by hand for a couple of minutes, which sounds like affectation but is not: the friction breaks the herbs slightly and pushes the paste into the grain, and a stirred kısır tastes noticeably flatter than a kneaded one.

Storage and Reheating

Refrigerate up to 3 days; keep the cucumber and tomato out if making ahead and fold them in at the last moment.

Swaps and Variations

• Out of spring onions? A small regular onion, finely sliced, or a few chives stirred in at the end both cover the job.

What to Serve Alongside

• Lettuce leaves as the spoon
• Ayran
• Part of a meze spread

Questions and Answers

Kısır Nutrition Facts

No nutrition figures are given for this recipe: they cannot be worked out reliably from its ingredient list (some ingredient lines cannot be read). Why some recipes have none.

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