Gavurdagi Salatasi with Falafel

In the May issue of Saveur, Anya von Bremzen wrote about living and eating in Istanbul. The pastries, like baked rice pudding, looked wonderful, and the mezes including salt pickled vegetables and a baba-gannouj-like dip looked great too. The stuffed eggplant caught my eye, and then I noticed this tomato salad with herbs and pomegranate. I guessed that this would be brightly flavored and fresh and have a nice, tanginess. It was suggested as a garnish for falafel, and that sounded perfect. I don’t know terribly much about Turkish food, but I’ve been learning from Give Recipe and Turkish Food Passion. Every time I visit those sites, I see dishes I want to try.

This salad is a combination of several chopped, fresh tomatoes, a lot of flat-leaf parsley, mint, some onion, fresh thyme, paprika, lemon juice, scallions, banana peppers, a little garlic, and pomegranate molasses. It’s garnished with ground sumac. When I read that ingredient list, I imagined all those flavors mingled together and couldn’t wait to try it. I used a falafel recipe from Epicurious, but I’m not sure if proper Turkish falafel is prepared in a different way. At any rate, the salad and falafel made a very nice pair. I whipped up a tahini, yogurt, lemon sauce and served a mound of salad with falafel sitting on top and plopped a little sauce in the center.

Both the falafel and salad recipes make enough to serve six, so after having this for dinner, there was plenty remaining for a few lunches. To describe the salad, I keep coming back to the freshness of it. The herbs and lemon and scallions did that for it, and the pomegranate molasses, although subtle, added a nice tangy sweetness. The flavors were so right with the chickpeas, onion, cumin, and coriander in the falafel. This is a definite keeper, and some day when I’ve practiced more with Turkish cuisine, I hope to be able to prepare an entire feast.

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