How to Make Asure Part 1/5

Janine Aloisi: Hello and welcome to Turkish Cuisine I’m Janine Aloisi and we have a very special show for you today and we are here at the Turkish Cultural Center in Manhattan. Today, we are going to introduce some customs of celebrating Asure Day. Asure Day is a delicacy which can be traced back to the story of Noah’s Ark. But we’ll get back to the meaning of Asure day in a bit. Now, we go to Jennifer’s Kitchen and get started.

Jennifer Aydin: Hello and Welcome to my kitchen as you know here on Turkish Cuisine we make home style Turkish cooking but today we’re dedicating this show to Asure. It’s a special show dedicated to the historical dish. It’s over 5000 years old and still alive today. Now we have a lot of ingredients for Asure and I’ll explain to you about Asure as the show goes on and the good authentic Asure always has 15 or more ingredients. So let’s start with our ingredients.

We have half of the seeds of 1 Pomegranate, a handful of golden raisins, 2 tablespoons of currants, 3 or 4 dried figs, ½ cup of beans, ½ cup of chickpeas and 2 tablespoons of Pistachio nuts, 1 cup of walnuts, 12 dried apricots, 1 cup of granulated sugar, 1 cup of pounded wheat,. 1 cup of blanched almonds, 1 tablespoon of rosewater, 1 tablespoon of cinnamon, 2 tablespoons of cornstarch and what I like to use whole cloves, this is a special spice and I like to use about 5 in my Asure.

So to make Asure you have to do some preparation from a night before. You have to take that pounded wheat that I told you before and this is what it looks like when it’s raw. This is just one cup of pounded wheat, you could get this at any specialty grocery store and then what you have to do is cook it, you have to boil it the night before and you have to use a lot of water. Cover it with the water and as it keeps boiling it’s going to keep soaking up that water.

So if you see that the water has diminished keep adding the water because in the end this is what you want your washed pounded which to look like. As you could see one cup expanded to about 3 or 4 cups and every time you’re making Asure you always make in multitudes even if you don’t want to because it’s custom that you always give it out to your friends and loved ones.

So this is just one cup of pounded whip but if you want to make more you can just add accordingly. So what you want to do is after that spoils you also want to soak your chickpeas and your beans. Now this is what it looks like raw, these are chickpeas and raw white beans but of course after being soaked overnight and then you have to cut them for about half an hour and you cook them separately because you don’t know how fast what the others are going to cook. So just cook them separately and if you are press for time you can use the can that’s always good.

` I mean the can you would get the white canola beans or kidney beans and you can just get chickpeas. Just make sure when you do get the chickpeas that you have to peel them because they’ll always have a skin and you can just press together with your thumb and forefinger and the skin will come off and you have to do it to all of the chickpeas.

Now what we’re going to do first is this is already boiled, you strain all the water from the night before and then you wash it, you wash it repeatedly under the sink strain it, get it really nice and clean. You’re going to seal out of dust coming of it anyway so that’s okay. Just wash it a few times and it’s already going to be wet. So we have to bring this to another boil, this is the day when we start making our Asure. Our weed is ready, our chickpeas are ready and our beans are ready.

So what I like to do first is add about 4 cups of water at room temperature and I’m going to add it to this, now you can add more water but you want to just make sure you’re adding it accordingly because your wheat is already wet and you don’t how much water is retained. So this will turn this on high and we put a cover on it just so it comes up to a boil fast and then we’ll watch it, one’s it starts boiling that’s when we’re going to add our whole close spice.

Now these spices they actually come from a tree and they look like a nail and you can buy them in any supermarket and they give a great flavor and when they’re fresh they look this rested brown color and actually it’s really hard to grind them so if you ever didn’t want to grind them you store them and you need one of those machines and keep air tight so it stays fresh.

When you use the whole one’s that’s what it gives it a great flavor and we use this all throughout Mediterranean cuisine. What I like to is one’s this gets boiling I like to add about 5 of this because with a great nice flavor and then later on we’ll take them out.