Turkish Recipes: Hünkar Beğendi - Ottoman Cuisine At Its Best

Yesterday, as part of our Turkish Food & Recipes Feature Week, we finally got down to some cooking and made our starter: Sebzeli Uskumru Çorbası. Well now it's time for the main course, and what else could we even consider making but our favourite Turkish dish - and an Ottoman classic - Hünkar Beğendi. 

Hünkar Beğendi literally translates as 'the sultan enjoyed it' and, if it's good enough for a sultan, it's good enough for us. Although we've tried this dish many times, in different restaurants around Fethiye and further afield, we'd never attempted to make this dish ourselves until we did it last week. We were brave and invited friends over to share it with us so the pressure was on to make it work...

Eating Hünkar Beğendi at a restaurant in Dalyan

(This recipe is taken from page 87 of Turkish cookery book, The Sultan's Kitchen, and is republished with permission of publishers, Tuttle Publishing. All photos are our own and the recipe is written in our own words.)

A Turkish Recipe For Hünkar Beğendi
Hünkar Beğendi is basically a lamb stew served on a bed of aubergine purée and the lamb and the aubergine are a perfect match for each other. The rich flavours are testament to the fact that this is a dish from the Ottoman kitchen. 

Trim excess fat from your lamb

The recipe in the book is for 6 people so we reduced the quantities to make it suitable for 4 people.

For the lamb stew:

• Melt a knob of butter and a good glug of olive oil in a large pan and, once the mixture is hot, add 500 grams of lamb meat. (The recipe suggests lamb shoulder or lamb shank cut into 1 inch chunks, but we used kuşbaşı - chopped lamb meat - from the butcher.)
• Brown the lamb all over and then add a finely chopped onion and 3 cloves of grated / minced garlic and stir.
• Now add 3 finely shopped tomatoes, a teaspoon of tomato paste (salça) and a cup of hot water and mix them together. (The recipe suggests peeling and deseeding the tomatoes but we left them as they were.)
• Add thyme and oregano (kekik), season with salt and pepper and then cover the pan with a lid. Simmer for one hour until your lamb meat is tender and the sauce has thickened. 

Before and after - The lamb stew becomes thicker as the sauce reduces

You can leave your lamb stew to one side, with the lid on, and reheat it when you are ready to eat.

Preparing your aubergines:

The beğendi part of this dish is a bechamel sauce that has puréed or finely chopped aubergine stirred into it. 

• Prick three medium sized aubergines with a sharp knife and place them on a baking tray in a hot oven - about 250 degrees (the recipe in the book suggests charring your aubergines over a naked flame for more intense flavour). Roast the aubergines until they're soft to touch (see photo below - top right image).

Beğendi is a bechamel sauce with aubergine

• Once the aubergines have cooled, slit down the middle and scrape out the pulp, discarding as many of the seeds a possible. Chop up the pulp.
• And here's a great tip from the book: Aubergines start to discolour really quickly so to keep them as they are, put the pulp in a bowl of cold water with a light sprinkling of salt and the juice of a lemon (see photo above, main image). You can leave the aubergine like this until you are ready to make your sauce.

To make the beğendi - aubergine purée:

• Press your aubergine pulp into a sieve to drain off all the excess water.
• Melt 50g butter in a large saucepan over a low heat and gradually add 50g of flour, stirring continuously with a wooden spoon.
• The mixture will resemble a dough, and now you can start to add 1 pint of milk a little at a time. Keep stirring continuously so your mixture remains smooth. Do this until you've used up all the milk and the bechamel is a smooth, runny liquid. (The recipe suggests mixing your milk with a tablespoon of heavy cream but we just used milk as the sauce is already rich - we'll try the cream as a treat some other time.)
• Keep stirring your sauce until it starts to thicken slightly. Now add your aubergine, stirring all the time.
• Now add a handful of grated cheese - we used a strong Izmir tulum but parmesan is good, too - and stir until your sauce is thick enough to make a suitable nest for your lamb.

Our serving of hünkar beğendi

On warm plates, spoon your sauce and make a nest in the middle. Add your lamb stew, drizzle the juices over your aubergine sauce and top with finely chopped parsley.

Making Hünkar Beğendi - Afternotes:

• Hünkar beğendi is easy to make when done in stages. We cooked this for friends who were arriving in the evening. The lamb stew and the aubergine pulp were prepared in the afternoon so that we only needed to reheat the stew and prepare the beğendi when we were ready to serve.
• Lamb is expensive in Turkey so we used kuzu kuşbaşı (chopped lamb pieces). This worked perfectly well but if you're making hünkar beğendi for a special occasion, use leg or shoulder of lamb.

We've now had a starter of uskumru çorbası and a main meal of hünkar beğendi. Tomorrow, it's time for dessert...

Afiyet Olsun

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