I am not big on blogging world but every once in a while i read through blogs. So far i can state that the women bloggers tend to give recipes on their blogs. To validate my assumption, i wont break the tradition and give a recipe of vegetarian manti. For those who are not familiar with manti it is fresh pasta with ground beef filling. It is a traditional food and you should definitely eat if you are planning to visit Turkey. I don't know if it is purely Turkish or originated from middle east though. But yeah i changed the recipe a little and used a whole wheat flour, and used a vegetarian filling instead of ground beef. That made the manti a little bigger in size than it should be but you can make the filling more smooth with a food processor and come up with smaller sizes. The smaller the size is the better. It kinda shows how professional you are on making manti. And the other difficulty i came across was working with whole wheat flour. I used a regular whole wheat flour and when i mixed it with a liquid it was very sticky. i would recommend the all purpose flour. If you can find, get the ones made for pasta. (And to be honest regular flour tastes better:))
What you need for dough:
1. 1 egg
2. 2 cups of flour (i used whole wheat, you can go for all purpose)
3. Water
Ingredients for filling
1. finely chopped small onion
2. finely chopped portobello mushroom (any mushroom will do the job)
3. 1 green chilli
4. finely chopped parsley
5. grated mozzarella cheese
7. pinch of salt, freshly grounded black pepper, dried rosemary
8. two table spoons of olive oil
Before starting dough making, prepare the filling. You need to cook the onion first with olive oil then add the rest. Be creative with the filling, add the flavours you like. And to add the mozzarella you need to wait until the cooked ingredients cooled down.
So you need to mix the ingredients for the dough until you get something feels like dough. it shouldn't be very sticky. You will be rolling out the dough, so you want it to have a smooth consistency. If the dough looks too big then divide it into pieces and roll out the pieces. Then make square pieces from rolled dough with knife and put the filling inside the squares. Pull the opposite sides of the squares together and stick them to one another (that process takes forever). After you are done you can bake them and cook in a boiling water or without baking freshly cook them in boiling water.
And be creative with the sauce, traditional Turkish sauce for manti is yoghurt mixed with crushed garlic and melted butter with powder red pepper is added on top.
afiyet olsun...
P.S. comment below if you know where manti is originated from.
