Grape Molasses in Turkey
By Robyn Eckhardt
Photos by David Hagerman
In Turkey’s Black Sea region, September foretells winter in the tendrils of fog snaking through stands of mountain pines and hunkering low over rice paddies. As the last purple figs drop, persimmons ripen on the tree and livid orange kanlıca mushrooms emerge from forest floors; at weekly markets small producers display new-crop dried corn and shelling beans. Plumes of smoke rise from backyard gardens, signaling an autumn ritual: pekmez, or fruit molasses, in the making.
Every fall across Turkey, a variety of fresh and dried fruits, sugar beets, carob and juniper are preserved as sweet syrups in a process that involves boiling in huge cauldrons over open fires to liquefy, separating out solids by sieving and then reducing the liquid by boiling again. Figs, pears, apples, mulberries and cactus are made into molasses, but the most popular pekmez by far is made with grapes (üzüm pekmezi).
Along with honey, grape molasses was the only sweetener in Turkey before the Ottomans imported cane sugar from Egypt (palace cooks favored its innocuous sweetness). Turkish scholar Mahmud of Kashgar included the word pekmez in his 11th-century dictionary of Turkic dialects, and the 13th-century saint, poet and mystic Mevlana Celaddiin-Rumi mentioned grape molasses in his couplets. Other written sources show that in Anatolia, early Turks transformed grape juice into “bekmes” and mixed it with toasted flour and butter to make a rustic helva, a soft, cakey sweet.
Other residents of the Mediterranean region had figured out how to extend the shelf life of grape juice even earlier. Ancient Greeks reduced grape juice for hepsema, an inexpensive honey substitute, and for hepsetos, a less concentrated version; the Romans made their own grape molasses, called sapa. Petemezi remains a revered ingredient in modern Greece. In southern Italy today, the juice of wine grapes is reduced for vin cotto or “cooked wine.”
In rural Turkey, the making of grape molasses and other preserved foods is a communal affair, and, like most any job related to food preparation, it is always carried out by women. Twenty-five kilos of grapes yield about three to five liters of molasses with a consistency that varies, depending on the grape variety and on the producer, from as treacly as corn syrup to as fluid as cooking oil. As with other laborious and time-consuming preservation activities (making tomato and pepper pastes, preparing figs and other fruit to dry, making fruit leather), villagers offer assistance to their extended family and neighbors, knowing that when it is their time to harvest they’ll receive assistance in kind.
Rather than extracting the fruit’s juice by boiling, as with other fruits, grape molasses makers begin by crushing stemmed and washed grapes, usually by stomping them in a trough or barrel. To separate out solids from the fresh grape juice—the must—they add a natural powder composed of about 90 percent calcium carbonate called pekmez toprağı or “molasses soil,” using a ratio of about 1 part “soil” to 50 parts must (the composition of the powder itself varies from region to region). As the must clarifies, sediments sink to the bottom, a process that takes four to six hours. The molasses soil also raises the pH level of the must to make it less acidic.
The must is then poured through muslin or other porous cloth into a large copper pot and cooked over a slow-burning wood fire (oak is often used) until it is reduced to syrup. As it cooks, the grape must appears, at first, not to thicken much at all. Then, about three-quarters of the way into the process, the bubbles on its surface suddenly begin to swell and become glossy, “like the surface of baklava after hot sugar syrup is poured over,” as a molasses maker jn Malatya province told me.
After the liquid has turned to syrup, the molasses maker tests for doneness by pouring a bit onto a plate and dragging the handle of a spoon through it. If the halves remain separate, the molasses is done; after it has cooled slightly, it is poured into glass or plastic containers and sealed. Some molasses makers reduce the must partially over fire, then transfer it to wide pans to finish by sun-drying; the flavor of the resulting syrup is especially intense, almost raisin-y. Stored in a cellar or dark, cool pantry, the grape molasses keeps until the next year’s batch is prepared and can be held even longer.
In some parts of Turkey producers beat egg white or soapwort into the finished molasses to lighten or thicken it. Zile, a district in the interior Black Sea province of Tokat, is known for its whipped grape molasses, which has the ethereal texture of honey butter. In Istanbul and other large urban centers, cane sugar is the sweetener of choice, especially for making sweets, but in Turkey’s rural grape-growing areas—the Black Sea, central Anatolia, southeastern Turkey, and the Mediterranean and Aegean regions—the purple-black syrup is a pantry staple.
Full of natural sugars, grape molasses is taken by the spoonful as a health tonic and drunk mixed with water to give energy, especially during winter and by pregnant women and women trying to conceive. It’s eaten at breakfast drizzled over yogurt and stirred together with tahini to make a dip for bread whose flavor recalls that of peanut butter and jelly. Cooks in Turkey use grape molasses for a vast range of sweet dishes: helva made with butter and wheat flour or semolina; a version of walnut baklava; warm sweet soups studded with nuts and dried fruit and sometimes flavored with wild thyme or other herbs; compotes of dried fruits; and spoon sweets with fruits such as quince and pear.
In Çorum, due east of Ankara, grape molasses is combined with melted butter and wheat-flour starch; the mixture is stirred for 20 minutes or so over medium-low heat, during which time it thickens and stiffens before fragmenting into a sort of nutty grape crumble that’s eaten on its own as a dessert (I like it with ice cream). In the Southeast, where much bulgur is produced and consumed, the grain is cooked and mixed with wheat-starch-thickened pekmez and nuts and eaten as a warm porridge or poured into a pan to set before being cut into bars called üzüm tarhanası (tarhana usually refers to a savory fermented and sundried mixture of yogurt, flour or bulgur and seasonings that is used as a soup base). Savory dishes, too, such as meat and fruit stews, meat-filled apple and quince dolma, and meats with dried beans, incorporate grape molasses.
Grape molasses-based dishes appear in modern guise as well, prepared by practitioners of what has been dubbed New Anatolian cuisine, a movement to re-envision traditional dishes while drawing on Turkey’s vast stock of artisanal ingredients. At Istanbul’s restaurant Mikla, chef Mehmet Gürs uses grape molasses sourced from the Aegean region as well as an intensely flavored, smoky grape molasses from Hatay province, bordering Syria, to finish off lamb dishes, to glaze vegetables and in desserts.
“Sugar is just sweet. It’s like a quick fix, whereas if you use pekmez there are tremendous depths and layers,” he says.
Grape molasses is an intermediate product as well. As in neighboring Georgia, cevizli sucuk—“walnut sausages”—are made by stringing walnut halves and dipping them repeatedly to coat in thickened grape molasses. One clear September morning in Çüngüş, a village of honey-colored sandstone Armenian structures in the mountainous northwestern part of Diyarbakır province, I watched a woman named Fikrit and her daughters-in-law prepare pestil, or fruit leather. As Fikrit stirred a big metal pot of not-quite-grape-molasses-thick must over a wood fire, one sister added in wheat starch. When the color of the molasses paled from purple-black to dark lavender, Fikrit spooned some of the mixture into a bowl, climbed a ladder to the flat roof of her house, and handed it to her daughters-in-law, who spread a thin layer onto special-purpose plastic mesh cloths with wide strokes, then sprinkled on sesame seeds and walnut pieces. A second bowl of the pekmez-wheat starch mixture, sprinkled with seeds and nuts, was shared by all as a hot snack. Later, as an antidote to the midday heat, we enjoyed bowls of the mixture lightly flavored with ground mahlep and refrigerated until it had solidified into a refreshing, cool jelly- pudding.
That evening, we harvested sheets of supple, subtly grape-flavored leather, ripping them from the cloths and folding them in half before wrapping in lengths of checkered fabric. Fikrit would sell some of the pestil to a dried-goods merchant in Diyarbakır city; the rest she would store in her cellar to eat plain; roll around chopped nuts and douse with honey; or to cook in butter with eggs or meat for a taste of autumn throughout the region’s long winter.
