So, I got it to a nice round circle and I want it to be really as thin as I can get it. And now, I’ll take my oklava. Now, this is how you have to do it. Just take it, roll it up, roll it to the middle, put some flour on there and roll it out. Just keep rolling it out until you get it nice and thin. And you’re going to see that it’s going to expand in size. Just keep it and roll it out.

So once you roll it out thin enough, now you want to take your knife and try to cut them into one-inch cube squares. What I do is go down first and then cut them all across so that they make nice little squares. Now usually when you make Manti, you make a lot. So you would make a lot more dough than we would. And of course, you have a big table and roll it out as big as you can as well that’s why people think manti is so great because they know how much time it took to cook it.

And now, we’re going to cut across. And then once we get them into nice squares, we’ll take our meat mixture and start filling them up. So once they’re all cut, you could try to lift them up and kind of spread them apart. They have flour underneath so they should spread out pretty easily. If they stick, just take a knife and kind of scoop it out. Now, we’ll get our meat mixture out of the fridge and start filling them up.

So what you want to do with our meat mixture, just grab a little handful with one hand. And with the other hand, just a pinch, a little pinch in the middle of each square. Now, these are going to plum up when you cook them so you don’t have to put too much meat. Plus, if you put too much meat, it’s going to be hard to close. So you literally just want a pinch. So let’s start filling them up.

So now that we’re almost done, I’m going to show you how to close the dumplings. When I was little, I used to close them corner by corner one at a time. I used to do one and then two, three and four, and then pinch. Now at this point, some of your dough may be a little dry. So you still have your little water here, you could just dip your finger in water. But now, I don’t do corner by corner because of course, we do so much. I just fold once, fold twice and pinch. Now see, this is a little dry so we’ll just get a little water and pinch. We’re going to do that with all of them. Now, when we make this in my house, it’s usually me, my mother, my sister and my mother’s friend Emina. We get together, all the women, and we make two pounds of beef and a lot of dough. And it takes us all day and it gets really messy and really fun. And at the end of the day, we eat it. It takes about all day to do and about five minutes to eat.

So let’s just close up all these dumplings and then we’ll start getting some water to boil so we can boil them. Now, make sure that when you close this that you don’t completely close them tight. And a great way to boil this is if you want a little extra flavor and you have some chicken stock extra at home, boil them in chicken stock. It gives them a really nice salty flavor, but plain water is fine. Once you’re done closing them all up, now it’s time to get them ready to be cooked. I’m just going to clean up my station and get them ready for boiling. As you could see, I clean up my station and I have some water boiling right here. And what we want to do is just add some salt as soon as it gets to a rolling boil. About two teaspoons of salt, mix it in there, and now it’s time to add our manti.

Now, you want to boil this for about seven minutes. You’re going to see them that once they’re cooked, they’re going to rise all the way to the top. But if you did the ones where you baked them first, then you only have to boil them for about three to five minutes. So it’s very fast either way you do it. Now, we could make our garnish. I’m just going to cover this so it comes to a boil fast. And in a small skillet, I’m going to melt half a stick of butter and a little bit of paprika. So let’s get that melted. Now, if you wanted this to be spicy, right about now, you would add hot pepper to this. We’re just going to make it a little sweet. We just want that butter to melt and then we’ll add our paprika.

And now, we can make our yogurt sauce. We have a plain and creamy yogurt, one cup. And we’ll just take two cloves of garlic. Now, this is actually good when it’s really garlicy. So the more garlic you put, the better. I like two really large cloves. You got to get it crushed in there too so the flavor gets blended in well. We’ll just mix that up.

And the third thing that I like to do is the tomato sauce. And how I like to do with my tomato sauce is really very simple. I just take this tomato paste that I have here and I add a little bit of boiling water. I’m just going to whisk this together until it comes to a nice thick sauce. Now, the original recipe usually doesn’t have a tomato sauce but you’re going to see that it gives it such a great flavor.

As soon as this is rising, you could just take your cap off, put it over here. See how they’re already rising to the top? It’s very fast. We’ll just wait a few more minutes on that and make sure that the meat is really well done. We’ve whisked this together so now we have our sauce. You just need a little bit. We want this butter to really melt nicely and then we’ll add a little bit of paprika. And you know, what we can also do is just add a little bit of salt to our yogurt. We got a good mix. And the yogurt is best when it’s room temperature.

So now, it looks like that our butter is ready. And as you could see, the finishing touches, the garnishes, you could do them all at once. It’s all very easy and very fast. Just put the cap on that so it stays nice and hot. And then I have my serving platter right here. And you could see the manti, just all of them, how they rise really nicely to the top. Now with manti, when you’re putting it in a dish, you don’t have to strain out all the water because a little wet tastes better. So you just want to grab and you see how they plump up. It’s just like Turkish dumplings. It’s so delicious. And all the end garnishes really bring out the flavor. It’s like you can’t even get enough that’s why it takes so long to make and that’s why make so much of it at a time. It’s just when you get them all in there and then I’m going to show you how to add our garnishes.

So first, what I like to do is put our yogurt sauce. We just want to spoon it over. Now, the heat from the manti is going to heat up that yogurt. It’s delicious yogurt and garlic and if you have any leftover, you can even eat that plain. And then what I like to do is just spoon over just a little bit of sauce. And at the very end, we add our butter garnish. Now, if you wanted to at this point, you can also add some sumac. Sumac is a spice that we use all throughout Turkish cuisine. It kind of has a little bit of a sour kick to it and you could just throw it right on top. Some people like to do that. But really, what you garnish with is this butter mixture. Just spoon it over and then we could even add a little bit of paprika right on top.

And this is our world famous Manti, Turkish dumplings. It’s delicious. You’re going to love it.