Vegetables as a dish of their own
Turkish cooking has a whole category of vegetable dishes called , “with olive oil”. Vegetables such as eggplant, green beans, artichokes, leeks and stuffed vine leaves are cooked gently with onion, tomato, a little sugar and plenty of olive oil, then left to cool in their juices. They’re served at room temperature or cold, often as part of a meze spread or as a light summer meal with bread.
For Pakistani cooks used to sabzi that’s bhuna’d and eaten hot, this is a new idea: the vegetables taste of themselves, soft and sweet, and they get better after a night in the fridge.
The classic: imam bayıldı
İmam bayıldı, “the imam fainted”, is the most famous zeytinyağlı dish: whole eggplants softened, split and filled with a large amount of onion, garlic and tomato cooked in olive oil, then baked and served cool. It’s the vegetarian sister of karnıyarık, which uses minced meat.
Other zeytinyağlı dishes you’ll meet in Turkey include green beans with tomato (taze fasulye), leeks with carrots and rice (pırasa) and stuffed vine leaves (yaprak sarma). The method is the same each time, so once you’ve made imam bayıldı you can apply it to seasonal vegetables like lobia pods or turai.
Olive oil on a Pakistani budget
Olive oil is expensive here, and these dishes use a lot of it. A few ways round that:
- Mix oils: cook in sunflower or canola oil and finish with a spoon of olive oil for flavour.
- Use ordinary olive oil for cooking and save extra virgin for drizzling.
- Don’t throw the oil away. The cooking oil is full of flavour; mop it up with bread.
Tips
- Cook slowly with a lid, so the vegetables steam in their own juice.
- Add a pinch of sugar to balance the tomato; this is traditional.
- Let them cool in the pan before refrigerating.
- Serve with lemon and fresh bread.
Our Turkish eggplant dishes post covers imam bayıldı and its relatives in detail.
More to try
Three more olive-oil classics: biber dolması (rice-stuffed peppers), yaprak sarma (stuffed vine leaves) and taze fasulye (green beans with tomato).