Turkish pumpkin dessert. Orange mood - pumpkin sweets (Kabak tatlısı)

Turkish housewives very often use pumpkin in cooking various dishes. In one Turkish family they treated me unusual dish from a pumpkin. The taste was so unexpected that I did not immediately realize that it was made from the most ordinary pumpkin. And yes, it surprised me. On a huge platter were translucent orange slices of pumpkin, drizzled with white tahina sauce and sprinkled with greenish pistachios. Such a riot of colors and flavors. I took the recipe for this dish as a basis and quite often cook this dish, refusing tahina and nuts. What is called - an option in an easier way. And when I treat guests with this dish, I sometimes replace tahina and nuts with a mixture of lemon juice and honey. It turns out no less beautiful and tasty.
Let's cook the pumpkin. Peel it from the peel and seeds and cut into pieces.
Place the chopped pumpkin in a saucepan, in which we will cook it in the future, and sprinkle with sugar.

Leave the pumpkin for 3-5 hours so that it gives juice. It is better to do this at night, and continue cooking in the morning.

Now let's cook the pumpkin in own juice on slow fire. When the pumpkin becomes soft, it is ready.

Put it on a dish and let it cool down. As I said, pumpkin can be sprinkled with nuts and poured with tahina or replace tahina with a mixture of honey and lemon juice, or you can eat it just like that, without any sauces. Believe me, it's very tasty!

Pumpkin baked - Zingata (Zıngata) winter.
baked pumpkin Turkish recipe from Aegean cuisine. This pumpkin is well served with yoghurt-garlic sauce. Baked pumpkin is a great side dish for poultry and fish.
By the way, I already brought Zingata summer zucchini. Served this pumpkin as a side dish with chicken thighs.

What do you need:
Pumpkin (peeled) - 1 kg.,
Onion - 3 pcs.,
Garlic - 5-6 cloves,
Chili pepper flakes - to taste
Ground black pepper - to taste
Flour - 1-2 tablespoons,
Tomato paste - 1 tbsp,
Water - 150 ml.,
Salt - to taste
Butter - 100 gr.

How to cook:
Peel the pumpkin, cut into slices, put in a baking dish.
Cut the onion into half rings, finely chop the garlic and put everything between the pumpkin slices and on top.
Sprinkle the pumpkin with black pepper, chili flakes and sprinkle with flour after it runs out.
Put in a small bowl tomato paste, pour water, add salt - mix everything with a fork. Top pumpkin with tomato sauce.
Spread pieces of butter on top of the pumpkin.
Place the form with the pumpkin in a preheated oven to 180 degrees, bake for 1 hour, at the end put it under the grill for 5 minutes to get a beautiful golden crust.
Serve baked pumpkin with garlic-yogurt sauce.
Grate a little garlic (for spice) into thick Greek yogurt, salt to taste and mix.

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Grilled chicken thighs "in Italian marinade"

Juicy chicken thighs marinated in "Italian flavors" are prepared quickly, eaten even faster!) An ideal lunch/dinner for weekdays, as you will need a minimum of time to prepare this delicious meal. The only thing is that you will need to marinate the meat in advance, preferably a day before last resort- 6-12 hours. I marinate in the evening and cook the next day. You need to fry in a grill pan for 4-5 minutes on each side. While the thighs are roasting, you can put in the oven to bake vegetables for a side dish.
It is best to immediately buy butchered thighs - without bone and skin, they are a little more expensive, but considering that you will need to take out the bone, remove the skin and the time spent on it - in fact it turns out to be something.

What do you need:
Chicken thighs (without skin and bones) - 6 pcs.,
Olive oil (vegetable) - 1 tbsp,
Dijon mustard - 1 tbsp.,
Lemon juice - 3 tablespoons,
Sugar - 1.5 tsp,
Salt - 1 tsp,
Black pepper - to taste
Chili dried flakes - 0.5 tsp,
Mixture of Italian dried herbs (or replace with a mixture of parsley, oregano, basil, thyme, rosemary) - 2 tsp

How to cook:
Rinse chicken thighs, pat dry and place in a large bowl. Sprinkle with chili flakes and Italian dried herbs - mix.
For the marinade, in a small bowl, mix with a fork until smooth. olive oil, Dijon mustard (it is not as spicy and vigorous as our "Russian"), lemon juice, salt, sugar.
Pour the marinade over the chicken thighs, mix well, massaging the meat.
Close the marinated meat with a lid and refrigerate for a day, or at least 6-12 hours.
An hour and a half before cooking, you need to remove the meat from the refrigerator so that it comes to room temperature.
Heat the grill pan well, grease vegetable oil and fry chicken thighs on both sides for 4-5 minutes.
Let's serve right away!

In winter, one of the most popular desserts is “kabak tatlysy”, pumpkin sweets. At the festive New Year's table they must be present. Turkish folklore says, that the first thing in the New Year you need to eat a piece sweet pumpkin then the coming year will be successful and abundant.

Walking around New Year's Eve Istanbul and looking into the windows of cozy cafes and pastry shops, we met this heroine of the Turkish New Year more than once.

I tried pumpkin sweets several times in Alanya and Istanbul, but I was not impressed. The pumpkin pieces were not very sweet, and too soft for my taste. Usually they prepare it like this: put pumpkin pulp cut into large pieces in a large saucepan, sprinkle with granulated sugar, pour a little water and boil it for an hour or two. No, this pumpkin is not for me.

One winter, shortly before the New Year, I saw on TV a New Year's report about a pumpkin, in which they gave a recipe for making a dessert from it. The recipe also sounded very simple, but still caught my attention to such an extent that on the next market day I bought a pumpkin (Kabak). More precisely, it is called "honey gourd" - bal kabağı. By the way, I learned from the same news program that pumpkin reduces the risk of cancer (especially lung cancer), reduces the risk of paralysis. Surely, she has many other useful qualities.

Pumpkin selling places can be seen from afar - no matter how colorful vegetables and fruits are sold from stalls, the “acidic” orange-green gamut of pumpkin is the brightest in the market. Whole pumpkins are very large, so buy them in parts. It is not possible to cut a pumpkin with a knife - huge fruits are cut with saws! Sellers deftly cut off the hard peel with special knives for peeling vegetables.

For the preparation of sweets, you should choose the brightest pumpkin in color with a wide layer of pulp. Take pieces-slices from only one pumpkin. After all, the density of fruits is different. Then, during heat treatment, the pieces will be of different consistency - some are ready, others are either too hard or too soft, like porridge. You will be sawed off 2-3 kilos from any half of the pumpkin you like, cut into narrow crescents, then cleaned in a couple of minutes. And you will get a pumpkin ready for use. If you want, bake in the oven, if you want, follow my recipe and cook sweets.

Ingredients

2 kg peeled pumpkin

1 kg of granulated sugar

for serving

chopped walnuts

thick fresh cream

So let's get started

Cut the peeled and seeded pumpkin into pieces about the size of a matchbox, put in layers in a wide flat pan, filling each layer with sugar.

To prepare an unforgettable and fragrant dessert, you need to choose the right pumpkin, it should be bright orange in the context. It is advisable to choose a honey pumpkin. First, the pumpkin needs to be peeled and cut into small identical cubes, put them on a baking sheet in an even layer.

Then sprinkle with sugar and put the clove buds, pour in some water and cover with foil. Bake the dessert in the oven for 25 minutes, and then it needs to be cooled. To make the Turkish pumpkin dessert look beautiful, before serving it must be laid out in bowls and sprinkled with walnuts.

Another wonderful pumpkin dessert that is prepared in Turkey is called Tatlisy's Kabak. It is prepared only from honey gourd, which is cut into large but thin pieces. They are laid in a pan in even layers, filled with water so that it slightly hides them.

Then you need to add sugar to taste, but ½ cup is enough for about 8 pieces. The pot is put on fire, the water is brought to a boil and the pumpkin is boiled for 20 minutes. You can also add honey at this time. The main thing is to make sure that the pieces do not boil, but, at the same time, become tender and soft.

You may need to practice a few times to get it right. How to cook a pumpkin dessert so that it is fragrant and truly divine? The whole secret lies in the right decoration and presentation. Best of all, pumpkin dessert will be combined with heavy cream or kaymak.

If you are in Turkey, then it will not be difficult to buy liquid halva and pour pumpkin into it. You can also sprinkle the dessert with chopped nuts or slices of ice cream. Another Turkish version of pumpkin dessert: for 6 kg of pumpkin, which is cut into small pieces, you need 3 kg of sugar.

The pumpkin should be put on a baking sheet greased with vegetable oil, covered with sugar and left to infuse for 2-3 hours, it is during this time that the vegetable will give juice. Then put the baking sheet in the oven for a few minutes at a temperature of 180 degrees. Before serving, pour the dessert with tahini and sprinkle with nuts.

Kabak tatlisi is a traditional Turkish dessert that consists of four basic ingredients: pumpkin, sugar, lemon and walnuts.

To prepare the dish, boil the pumpkin pieces in their own juice with the addition of zest, lemon juice and sugar, and when serving, sprinkle with finely chopped walnuts. Sounds pretty unpretentious, don't you agree? But don't let the modest composition fool you - the dessert turns out to be incredibly tasty. With the combination of juiciness, sweetness of pumpkin and mouth-watering pieces of nuts, the dessert evokes associations with baklava, but the tender pieces of pumpkin that melt in your mouth, thanks to the addition of lemon, taste closer to candied fruit.

Now, in the fall, when the pumpkin is the most ripe and delicious, it's time to cook this delicious dessert. Don't procrastinate and be sure to indulge in this simple and delicious delicious treat yourself and your loved ones! Let's start?!

Prepare the ingredients.

Lemon according to the classic recipe is not an essential component of the dish, but it softens the natural taste of the pumpkin (which not everyone likes) and gives it an appetizing spicy note that evokes associations with candied fruit. The same applies to cream added when serving dessert. It is desirable, but not at all necessary.

Peel, cut the pumpkin into large pieces and put some of the pieces in a single layer in a deep saucepan.

When slicing a pumpkin, be guided by the size standard box matches - pieces bigger size you can and should cut it, but it doesn’t cost less. However, the size and shape of pumpkin pieces matter only when serving, for the visual perception of the dish. Therefore, strive to ensure that the pieces are approximately the same size and shape, but the remaining, unsized pieces can also be added to the pan.

Sprinkle a layer of pumpkin thin layer Sahara. The traditional proportion of pumpkin and sugar is 1 to 2, i.e. 1 kilogram of sugar per 2 kilograms of peeled pumpkin. I add a little less sugar - 1 kg per 2.5 kg of pumpkin, it turns out no less tasty and sweet enough.

Repeat layers until you run out of pumpkin. The final layer should be a layer of sugar. Add lemon juice and rind (remaining after squeezing the lemon juice) into the pot.

The amount of pumpkin at this stage may seem quite impressive, but during the cooking process, the pumpkin will be reduced, and its volume will decrease by more than half.

Cover the pot with a lid and let the pumpkin brew for room temperature at least 3 hours for her to let the juice flow. You can leave the pumpkin to infuse overnight.

When the pumpkin starts to juice, put the pan on the fire and bring the mixture to a boil.

When the syrup boils, reduce the heat to a minimum, cover the pan with a lid and cook the pumpkin for 1 hour. If the pieces of pumpkin are very large, they can be boiled for 90 minutes so that they are better saturated with syrup.

If you want the pumpkin flavor of the dessert to be more pronounced, the lemon peel must be removed before cooking. If you prefer to soften the taste of pumpkin and add spicy notes to it, leave it.

After 60 minutes, remove the lid from the pot and cook the pumpkin for another 30 minutes. Then turn off the heat and remove the lemon peel from the pan.

Loosely cover the pot with a lid so that steam can escape from the pot as it cools, and allow the pumpkin to cool completely before serving the dessert.

To serve, put chilled pumpkin slices on a plate, sprinkle with finely chopped walnuts, add a little cream if desired, and serve the dessert to the table.

Turkish pumpkin dessert "Kabak tatlisi" is ready. Bon appetit!