The Capsule Pantry: Spiced Ground Meat Wraps with Spicy Turkish Ezme Salad
Making the most of early tomato season
The Capsule Pantry in one sentence: Reduce your food waste by “thinking like a chef” with highly flexible recipes based on a capsule pantry of just 50 ingredients.
If there is one thing Croatia does well, it’s seasonal food. I never feel more connected to what I eat than I do when I spend time here.
Happily, it’s the start of tomato season down here in Split which gets me more excited than pretty much any other fruit-vegetable. Because out-of-season tomatoes suck.
After a heavy weekend of eating out and wine tastings, I wanted to make something fresh and vegetable-heavy.
Enter Ezme salad.
Ezme is a Turkish staple. Recipes vary widely (which is great for the flexibility nature of the Capsule Pantry) but in its essence, it’s a spicy tomato-based salsa with finely chopped bell peppers, parsley, lemon juice, and pomegranate molasses if you can find it. Being in Croatia, I couldn’t find pomegranate molasses — nor would I want to add it to my list of traveling spices — so I left this out. Feel free to do the same.
Ezme is usually made with fresh tomatoes but because we’re at the start of the season, I chose to roast mine first to concentrate the flavors. If it’s not yet tomato season where you live, I’ve included some alternative ideas in the variations section below. There is no reason you couldn’t make this with canned tomatoes for instance.
Watch me make this salad on TikTok.
I put mine on the side of some freshly made flatbreads, tzatziki, and ground pork spiced with cumin, smoked paprika, garlic, and lemon juice.
You can build this dish any way you like. My husband likes to stuff his bread like a burrito whereas I’m happier making it into a sort of meze-style plate using the bread to dip. You can add lettuce, cucumber, tomatoes and / or hummus to the mix too.
I’ve also included substitutions for the meat. Pork is what I happened to have in the fridge but you can swap for plenty of other things including vegetables.
Serves 4
Key: Bold = Capsule Pantry ingredients
For the Ezme salad:
6 small or 4 large ripe tomatoes
1 small-medium green bell pepper finely chopped
Small handful of parsley finely chopped
A whole fresh red or green chili finely chopped or a generous teaspoon of dried chili flakes (I like to have Turkish pul biber with me at all times).
Juice of half a large lemon
Half a medium-sized white or red onion finely chopped
Optional: 1 tsp pomegranate molasses
Sea salt for seasoning
For the spiced pork filling:
500g / 1lb ground pork
2 garlic cloves finely minced
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp each smoked paprika, cumin, and oregano
1/2 tsp turmeric (omit if you don’t have it to hand)
Juice of half a lemon
To serve:
One quantity of basic flatbreads
One quantity tzatziki
Additional ideas: chopped lettuce or cucumber, hummus, pitted olives, jarred Turkish chilies
Make the salad:
If you are roasting your tomatoes, oil and season them whole and place them in a 350F/180C oven for 30 minutes, turning halfway through. Leave to cool, slip off the skins and finely chop.
If you’re not roasting, simply finely chop the tomatoes.
Add all ingredients to a mixing bowl and mix.
Add a pinch of sea salt and taste. I found mine to be a little bitter thanks to the lack of pomegranate molasses and the green bell peppers they have here in Croatia so I added a tiny amount of sugar (around 1/2 tsp for 4 people) for balance. This is your call depending on the ripeness of your ingredients.
You can also adjust the lemon juice, spice level, and parsley if you think it needs more.
Make the ground pork filling:
Marinade the pork in all the ingredients for as long as you have to hand (which can be as little as 10 minutes or as long as overnight).
Heat a frying pan with a splash of olive oil. Add the ground pork and cook until it’s starting to go golden.
Serve with the suggestions above.
Dietary restrictions
This whole meal is naturally nut-free.
The Ezme salad is naturally dairy-free, gluten-free, and vegan.
Make the whole meal dairy free by either omitting the tzatziki entirely or using vegan yogurt.
Make it vegan: swap pork for chopped mushrooms, aubergine (eggplant), or courgettes (zucchini) or a mix.
The spice mix
The spice mix here is what I often use on pincho Moruños — Moorish kebabs from Spain.
Two other marinades you could use include:
The meat
Pork isn’t found in Turkish cooking and I did feel a bit weird using it to compliment the salad. But this is The Capsule Pantry - we don’t like to waste here - and ground pork is what I had to hand. You could also use:
Leftover roast chicken
Ground beef
Chunks of pork, souvlaki style
Steak strips
The salad
Every Turkish restaurant has a different recipe for Ezme salad, but the core ingredients of onion, pepper, tomato and spice largely stay the same. Some substitutions include:
Swap green bell peppers for red or yellow ones.
Use chopped tomatoes if it’s not yet tomato season. Find whole plum or cherry tomatoes, drain them from their juice and finely chop.
The flatbreads
If you want to keep things super simple use store-bought pita bread, flour tortillas or even naans.
The tzatziki
If I don’t have cucumber to hand, I will omit it which turns it into a herby yogurt instead. Add extra parsley if you have it to hand.
If your parsley came in a big bunch, you can use it up in a Tabbouleh salad.
Leftover ground pork can be used to make salsiccia con polenta.
Make double or triple quantity flatbreads and freeze them. Defrost by wrapping them in foil and sticking in the oven for 10 minutes.
Use up leftover Ezme salad for lunch the next day.
Serve the herby yogurt with poached eggs and bread for breakfast.