So that you may learn, and I may not forget, here is the nub and gist of mantı preparation. First off, the dough consists of flour, eggs, and salt water. How much? Oh, enough. Of course these things are only "measured" by the watchful eye of the senior Turkish housewife present, in this case, my coworker's mother. The dough is kneaded and kneaded and kneaded by rolling your fists on it, kind of like slow-motion punches. Then it is separated into smaller chunks, in our case, four. Then more kneading and more flour to keep it from sticking. There is a special low, round, wooden table and long, thin rolling pin used for mantı, gözleme, börek; basically anything that involves rolling out dough. I would give the Turkish names for the table and rolling pin here but a) I forgot them and b) they differ by region.
The smaller hunks of dough are rolled first in the normal fashion of stroking the pin across the dough's surface. After an appropriately thin dough is achieved the whole thing is rolled around the thin rolling pin and pulled outwards by the motion of your hands from the middle to the outside. (That sounds a lot more complicated then it is, and if I had a picture of myself engaged in this pursuit, it would be much clearer.) In any case you stretch and stretch the dough until it is almost as big as the table, and then you do it a few more times, just in case. Then the dough is cut into the tiny squares you see below and filled with a finely chopped mixture of ground beef, onion, parsley, salt, and "spices", which I believe referred to red pepper in this case. You poke a little morsel of the meat mixture onto each square, and then fold the corners together and then press them into the middle to form a little pocket*. This part takes the longest- filling and folding each of the tiny squares took about 3 hours, with four tireless women working together.
After this, the many many finished products are at long last boiled for about 10 minutes, their size making it extremely easy to cook them quickly. Traditionally there are several sauces for them, and sometimes they are also used as dumplings in soup. In our case we put some lightly spiced tomato paste (salça) in butter and added a small amount of this to salted and slightly watered-down yogurt (ayran) by way of sauce. I have also eaten them with nothing but an entirely ill-advised amount of butter and walnuts on top.
(Aside: this picture was taken from Turkish wikipedia, credited to OsManduRdu, but it is almost identical to the scene in my Turkish coworker's kitchen. The spice in the jar is sumac, to be spooned on later if desired.)A total of about 5 hours of work makes them taste at LEAST five times as good as in any restaurant. When I first began eating I inhaled those little yogurt-covered meat-packets as though I hadn't eaten for days (and by virtue of my being in Turkey we all know that is utterly impossible), and when I finished my last bite it slowly dawned on me that in polite circles the rapidity of my consumption might have been considered a bit rude. But as I looked up from my plate for the first time since the first taste hit my eager taste buds, I saw that I was behind in finishing by two other girls, and they immediately begged me to let them fill my plate anew, a request which I quickly and grateful obliged.
Afiyet olsun!
*In other words, you reunite the meat, which I'll call Numa, with the mantı's core. Sorry, that joke is for the benefit of only one reader of this blog.
Sounds fun and delicious!
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