Turkish Food - Ezo Gelin Çorbası

Sour pomegranate dressing

Food is our favourite subject so I'm going to write the recipe for the lovely Turkish food that is Ezo Gelin Çorbası (spicy red lentil soup). If you're wondering why you're looking at a photo of plastic cola bottle right now, all will be explained later in the post. For now, back to the soup...

I've been making ezo gelin soup for a few years now. As usual, I started off following Turkish recipes in books and it's gradually changed to how I make it now, a few ingredients altered here and there to suit our taste. I've had a quick look around on the internet as well and I've still to see the same recipe twice so that's going to be my back-up if anyone says to me, 'That's not what you do.' (It happens a lot here!) Turkish recipes are passed down through the generations and different families have their own, slight variations.

As with a lot of Turkish food recipes, you don't have to be really careful with your quantities for ezo gelin soup. It depends how thick you want it to be so you can just experiment. These very rough amounts I'm writing here make 4 decent-sized 'hearty' portions - when eaten with a loaf of crusty bread that is!




A Turkish Recipe for Ezo Gelin Çorbası

• Finely chop an onion
• Peel and dice a large potato
• Put these into a big pan and add about three quarters of a mug of red lentils
• Pour in a tin of chopped tomatoes (or use fresh ones if you're in a country that produces tomatoes in abundance - like we are - sorry)
• Add a couple of mugs of hot water or stock - don't do what Barry did one time when we were trekking. He made a flask of courgette soup, used chicken stock and proudly presented it to a vegetarian friend to show he was thinking of her. Luckily, she knows exactly what we're like - complete meatatarians - and asked him what he'd used as stock. The penny dropped and she ate her sandwiches - and there was more soup for us.
• Salt, pepper, chilli (it's supposed to be spicy) and I also add a bit of cumin as well because we love it.
• Bring it all to the boil and simmer for about 40 minutes
• Done!

If you like your soup smooth, you can blend it at this point. We like ours to be a bit more 'meaty' so I just mash it a little bit. Some people add rice or bulgur wheat to help thicken the soup and I've experimented with these but I prefer to just use potato. You can also add a bit of salça (tomato or red pepper puree) for a bit of extra richness.

A steaming bowl of spicy ezo gelin çorbası

When you serve it, it's lovely with some chilli flakes sprinkled on top (as in the photo above) and the juice from a wedge of lemon - and of course, the fresh, crusty Turkish bread.

Nar Ekşisi
So, what is the photo at the top all about? Well, in yesterday's photo, you might be able to see some brown drops in the soup. These brown drops are what is in the plastic bottle. It's not cola, it's nar ekşisi (sour pomegranate sauce). It's used in Turkish food a lot and is normally drizzled over salads or eaten with fish. You can buy factory produced nar ekşisi in the shops but it's also really easy to get hold of homemade versions. This is home-made (hence the plastic cola bottle). We bought it from a friend's mum who lives in Kayaköy and it's delicious. It's not traditional to add nar ekşisi to soup but we had no lemon and needed something tart to put in the soup. It works.