How to Make Imam Bayildi

Janine: Hello and welcome to Turkish Cuisine. The culinary center of Turkey, Istanbul, and understanding Turkish cooking wouldn’t be complete without knowledge of the Sultan’s kitchen. In Tapkapi Palace, hundreds of cooks specialized in different categories of food in order to feed thousands of guests. This enormous task set a precedent for the quality of Turkish food today. And now you can eat like royalty when Jennifer shows you how to prepare some of these dishes. Jennifer: Welcome to my kitchen. One thing I love about Turkish cuisine is every now and again you come across a dish that has so much history and such great stories behind it gets really exciting, like the dish we're going to do today, Imam Bayildi. Imam Bayildi literally means that the Imam fainted. It was so good that he fainted. So here are the ingredients. We're going to need one cup of sunflower or corn oil for frying, half a cup of olive oil, one green pepper, three tomatoes chopped, two onions finely sliced, I have 7 baby or Italian eggplants right here, one cup of finely chopped parsley, three tablespoons of mint, six cloves of garlic, or course my pepper and salt, and we also have sugar. As with every olive oil dish, we always have to add sugar. And here I have water which I'm going to add my salt and soak in our eggplants. So the first thing we're going to do is I'm going to put some salts in my water. Now for this is for soaking our eggplants. And the reason you need to do that is because, number one, you need the salt to penetrate. And number two, it helps to get rid of the bitter juices. So what you want to do is take your washed and dried eggplants, and as you can see I've cut off the heads. And kind of just slice them down the middle and go around. Kind of making a like a zebra stripes. And then what you want to do is take your knife and pierce the middle of the eggplant. But you don’t want to go down too far, you don’t want to hit the bottom. Because these are going to be for stuffing. So just a little slice. It’s kind of like when we make the Carnietta. So I'm going to take this and keep doing this same thing and we're going to let it soak in our water for about half an hour to an hour. And then once that’s done, we're going to squeeze it and then fry it in our frying pan. And there are so many dishes all throughout Turkish cuisine that have the eggplant. Over 40 different varieties. I think it’s one of the most popular vegetable, and you can do so much with it. You could smoke it and grill it and barbecue it. So it’s really versatile. Now I'm going to get ready to make our stuffing. Now the stuffing is really great to make it now, because as you know the zates in yellow or the olive oil dish is served at room temperature or cold. So you can just make this now, get it ready and then once we fry that, we're going to put it all together and then cook those together. So now, usually when I do olive oil dish, I like to substitute the olive oil for corn or sunflower oil because it’s a lot lighter. But this time, because it’s such an authentic and original dish, I'm going to use original extra virgin olive oil. Because you know, as the story goes, as one of the story goes, the Imam who is a religious leader love the dish so much that he fainted. That’s one proverb. Another one is that he was so impress with all the expensive olive oil that is used that he fainted because he was just so happy about it and it tasted so good. So I don’t which one you wanted to believe, but I just think they're both so interesting. It’s always about the Imam, and he always want to talk about when they eat Imam Bayildi they faint. So even people when they go to restaurants, they're like pretend, oh I ate it and I fainted. So I don’t know. So now we're going to take our onions. Now, as my mom says, she says always to me in Turkish, Imam Bayildi suana seviou. Which means that it loves onions. So don’t be afraid to use those onions. And as you could see, I sliced them. Just going to put them in here and get them really nice and grilled. And then we could start adding our garlic cloves. And you know what's really great about Turkish cuisine is if you’re a vegetarian, there's so much for you to eat. There is so much variety. So we're going to sauté up those and now I'm just going to chop up some garlic. And I have six cloves here and I'm going to chop them. Because chopping them gives it really great flavor. And then this way, when they're roasted, every now and again you’ll get a piece of garlic in your mouth that really taste great. So just throw them in gradually. It was said during the Ottoman Empire that he imperial chef never likes to cook with recipes. They like to cook with their feelings and their hearts and their soul. And they really took pride in all of their work. That’s why that era of food is so famous. And it’s actually great because Turkey has really kept a lot of the culture today. So even though a lot of it is modernized, which it is a very modern country, they still keep a lot of the old traditions and the culture which makes it really great. And as everything sizzling, you can even smell the aroma. I mean, is there anything better than garlic and onions sizzling in oil? I don’t think so. So there we go, it doesn’t have to be that fine of a chop. If I wanted it that fine, I would have crushed it. But I definitely want to chop because I like getting all those bits and pieces in there. So you want to sauté this a little and put this now on a low heat. And then it can gradually add in all of our ingredients. Now I got one green pepper, and if you wanted this to be spicy, now is the time to add in a hot chili pepper or jalapeno pepper. What I'm going to do for later is I'm going to fry these skinny green peppers that I have here, they're very spicy. I'm going to fry them and I'm going to place them over our Imam Bayildi. It’s really going to give them a kick. Now we’ll just add our tomatoes. Now is the great time to add in our sugar. We just want a little bit, like a tablespoon. We're add in our mints. And fresh mint is always best. Because in a Turkish kitchen, we love to use the freshest produce. Maybe even stuff that’s grown in our own backyard. Like the tomatoes and cucumbers, mints, dill, we love to grow it all. Now is a good time to add the parsley. You could just see that cooking up together real nicely. You could see the beautiful variety of color, it’s really great. And of course we always have to add a little salt and a little pepper. So we’ll just do it like this actually. Just little sprinkle, little sprinkle. Now you don’t have to cook this too much because it’s going to cook once you stuff it in the eggplant. So sauté this up a little more, and then I think I'm just going to turn it off, cover it and just let it settle. And then we’ll check on our eggplant and see how they're doing. So now that it’s been half an hour, I think these are really good and salted. I'm just going to get my skillet ready, put it on high. And for frying, I always like to use corn or sunflower oil, because it’s much lighter. And now what we're going to do is we're going to just take our eggplants, just squeeze the excess water out of them. This is kind of like what we do when we do the Carnietta, which is a version of this with meat that actually means Split Belly. The reason they call it Split Belly is because that’s what you're doing. You're literally splitting the belly of the eggplant. It’s the same thing, just with ground beef or ground lamb. So now that we got all these squeeze, now we're going to cook them. But we're not going to completely cook them, we just want to kind of brown them all around. Because after that, we're going to stuff them with our stuffing and then cook it all together. So you see we got lot more of cooking done. So now, once you see this is nice and hot, you could start placing them in one by one. And you could try to stick them all in there, because these are going to shrink when you cook them. So you want to keep turning them every couple of minutes, make sure they're turning really nice and golden brown. Now they don’t have to cook completely because we're going to cook them again in the oven. So right now, what I'm going to do is get our platter which we're going to cook it in. so I have right here. And you can use tin or aluminum or a Pyrex as I've used here. And usually I like to soak up all the extra oil on a paper towel. But because the beauty of this dish is having all that extra oil, we’ll leave it. We’ll leave it for flavor. And just want to put this, the slit side up. So wherever you made the cut, that’s where you want them up, because we're going to open them up and we're going to stuff them with our delicious stuffing. Just keep turning them around. Squeeze out a little excess and just put it there. Alright, so you see we have a lot of space which is good. This is going to allow the eggplants to cook up really, really nicely. And this is our stuffing. This is how it supposed to look. It supposed to have a variety of color, an abundance of smell and flavor. It’s really delicious. And this is just the perfect amount to stuff the eggplants that we have. And if there's a little extra, just spoon it over. And I still got my oil hot over here, because I still got to fry up my green eggplants. So what I'm going to do is just take two tablespoons, and with the dull side I'm just going to slightly push open the eggplant together. Now again, the eggplant is the most popular vegetable all throughout Turkey. You could smoke it, you could stuff it, you can fry it, you can grill it. I mean, just the possibilities are endless. And it taste great too. Now once you got them all opened, we're going to stuff them with our delicious stuffing. And whatever is left, you can even eat that by yourself, because it’s just so good. It’s a little hot, just watch it. And this is why the Imam fainted. I'm going to take all the extra oil and spoon it over our eggplants. We don’t want to waste any of that delicious olive oil. So we're almost done. Now you want to have your oven preheating to 350 degrees. And right now we're just putting our skinny green peppers and fry this up. Now these are really spicy. So if you want, you can get the sweet ones. Now your peppers are going to be fried up really fast because the oils are really hot. And they're very spicy, just want to take one and lay it across each eggplant. This is going to cook up all together really nicely in the oven which I have preheating at 350 degrees. Now you don’t have to do this part, this is just the way my husband likes it. So of course, that’s what I do. Now you're going to let this boil up in the oven for at least 20 minutes to half an hour. Keep checking it, make sure its boiling. Make sure it’s nice and tender. But make sure it doesn’t dry out. And then when we come back, we're going to get ready to make our Kaik Kefta.