My Mother’s Muhammara (Red Pepper and Walnut Dip)

I got to know muhammara, Middle Eastern dip of roasted red bell peppers and walnuts, as a signature dish of my mother-in-law. Her muhammara is legendary. Ask anybody who ate at the mom’s restaurant. Daughter to an Egyptian immigrant settled on the Easter Mediterranean coast of Turkey, she is from the lineage of the people who consider dishes such as hummus, falafel, kibbeh (aka içli köfte), muhammara and alike to be their own. And as this Middle Eastern heritage food is rather exotic to the rest of Turkey, the complexity of flavors wows the local eaters as they get initiated into this culinary tradition, even if only through eating muhammara.

Muhammara is so delicious that I can’t stand the fact it is served in the tiny bowls. When I see it arriving to the table, I always think the quantity will not suffice. Until I scoop some with a piece of bread and savor the flavors rolling on my palate that make realize that experience-wise I am done. The tiniest bit of muhammara feels utterly satisfying, and only the greed drives me to finish the tiny bowl.

There was a period of time when mom was making muhammara for her regular customer running a deli in Istanbul. 25 kilograms of goodness every week. Mom had no shortage of assistants for that epic muhammara undertaking as no one could resist the reward of cleaning a humongous pot where she created her magic mix with a few pieces of bread afterwards.

Dad would be going through the trays of walnuts to remove any leftover membranes or sharp particles of the cracked shells. He then would grind the walnuts in the good processor until fine, but not too mealy. Someone else would be removing the crumb from the slightly stale loaves mom asked the bakery to set aside for her the day before. Mom’s assistant would soak the crumb in water and then energetically squeeze as much liquid out as possible.

I would be orchestrating the business of roasting the red peppers: filling each tray with plenty of the plump beauties, fitting multiple trays in our industrial-size oven, checking when the peppers get some black spots and puff up only to deflate the minute after you take them out of the oven, a clear sign the peppers are roasted to perfection. I would then be placing the trays on the cold tile floor of the cellar to let cool before we are ready to peel them and remove the seeds.

Then mom would do the mixing, the sacred part of the muhammara preparation she never entrusted to anybody else as 1) you want the texture to be right without any guileful lumps of pepper paste or bread crumb lurking in the mix 2) you want to make sure the seasoning is perfect.

I have never tasted muhammara as good as mom’s because of her exuberant, truly Middle Eastern approach to seasoning. Some muhammara tastes cumin, some tastes red pepper flakes. With mom’s you would not be able to tell what spices are there because their combination is skilfully balanced. She uses a particular mix of garlic, olive oil, red pepper flakes, cumin, coriander and dry mint.

In addition (and before you notice) mom would quickly pop in a few packages of acuka / acıka spice mix (also known as poy), a plastic-wrapped stick of spices where each ingredient has got its segment. The mix typically includes cumin, coriander, fenugreek, red pepper flakes, dry mint and such. An honest way to sell a spice mix showing each component and its quantity, poy is meant to flavor acuka /acıka, another immigrant dish that arrived from Abkhazia as the Caucasians settled on the Black Sea coast. Acuka has been transformed beyond recognition by the modern Turkish cooks: from a preserve of salty hot red peppers it evolved into a muhammara-like spread. So the acuka spice mix rightfully ends up in the mom’s muhammara.

As mom would do the mixing, I would volunteer to do the math. Our kitchen scale limit is 3 kg, so there was no way to know we had exactly 25 kg of muhammara unless we weighted each ingredient separately, took notes and then did the math. I can safely bet those 25 kg muhammara notes of mine are the only written (and complete!) recipe of the mom’s signature dish. I could get rich just by selling it, maybe to somebody who is making 25 kg of muhammara on the regular basis. Unfortunately, when you scale down the recipe by the factor of 50, the math does not work in the same way, so I had to completely change the proportions.

There are two ways of making muhammara: in summer and early fall you use roasted red bell pepper resulting in a thinner and brighter color of the dip, while the rest of the year you rely on the red pepper paste, a staple ingredient of the Turkish home cooking, making the paste thicker and the color darker.

While you can still make a fantastic muhammara with a high-quality homemade pepper paste off-season, it seems a crime not to take advantage of the pepper bounty right now. So I decided not to be a thrifty housewife madly in love with the convenience of the ready-made pepper salça (paste) and and to go heavier on the red peppers (original approach practiced in the Middle East).

My muhammara turned beyond words: sweetness of the red peppers balanced with the bitterness of the walnuts, all the spices peacefully mingling with each other, bright red color as inviting as ever. I was staring at the huge bowl of muhammara thinking we probably need to call friends so we could ever finish it: however much you love muhammara, little goes a long way.