Turkish baked pumpkin. turkish pumpkin dessert

Turkish cuisine is rich in various desserts. Turks use a variety of fruits and vegetables to prepare desserts. Once, while visiting a Turkish family, I was treated to a pumpkin dessert. I was pleasantly surprised by the taste of this dish. In Russia, recently, pumpkin is rarely used in the diet, but in vain, pumpkin is well absorbed by the body, it can be used for baby and diet food. Pumpkin is rich in many vitamins. I suggest you get acquainted with the recipe for making a pumpkin dessert, which I “peeped” in a Turkish family.

Preparation time: 15 min.

Cooking time: 360 min.

Servings: 5

Ingredients

Walnut - 100 grams
Pumpkin - 1,000 grams
Sugar - 400 grams

Cooking

Let's prepare the pumpkin. Remove skins and seeds and cut into small pieces. Roast walnuts lightly in a pan and chop.

Put the pumpkin pieces in a saucepan and sprinkle with sugar. Close the lid and leave for 5 hours. During this time, the pumpkin will give juice, the sugar will dissolve and soak the pumpkin.

We put the pot with pumpkin on the stove and simmer over medium heat for at least an hour. Periodically turn the pumpkin over.

We take out the finished pumpkin from the pan, put it on a serving dish and let it cool completely. Before serving, drizzle with tahini and sprinkle with chopped nuts.

In traditional Turkish cuisine, tahina is used as a sauce for the finished dish. If you can’t find ready-made tahina in stores, then you can cook it yourself, or replace it with a mixture of lemon juice and honey.

In winter, one of the most popular desserts is “kabak tatlysy”, pumpkin sweets. They must be present at the festive New Year's table. Turkish folklore says, that the first thing in the New Year is to eat a piece of 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.

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.

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.

Turkish housewives very often use pumpkin in cooking various dishes. In one Turkish family, I was treated to an unusual pumpkin dish. 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 we will cook the pumpkin in our own juice over low heat. 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!

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 sprinkle with finely chopped walnuts when serving. 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 autumn, when the pumpkin is the most ripe and delicious, it's time to cook this delicious dessert. Do not delay and by all means treat yourself and your loved ones to this simple and deliciously delicious delicacy! Let's start?!

Prepare the ingredients.

Lemon according to the classic recipe is not an obligatory component of the dish, but it softens the natural taste of pumpkin (which not everyone likes) and gives it an appetizing spicy note that evokes associations with candied fruits. 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 of a standard matchbox - larger pieces can and should be cut, but less is not worth it. 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 the pumpkin layer with a thin layer of sugar. 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 stand at room temperature for at least 3 hours to release the juices. 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 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.