Pomegranate Syrup Revisited

A few weeks ago we finally tried making our own pomegranate syrup, or nar ekşisi.  I've written about this delicious staple of our household's diet before, so click here and here if you want a little history of our love affair with this condiment.  

C bought 15kg of pomegranate from a small local grocer's for about 20 Turkish Lira, a bargain in Istanbul, and one Sunday afternoon after brunch, we put our friends to work peeling the lovely fruit!  There's nothing like good company and conversation to make a job fun and easy!

We then squeezed the juice out of the seeds, drinking several glassfuls of the sweet-sour juice in the process.  (Hint: if you're careful about separating all the white pith from the fruit, you don't get any of the bitterness that comes with pressed pomegranate juice, where an entire half fruit is simply squeezed.)


We lit the mangal and let the juice condense in a cast iron pot for several hours, until it reached the consistency we wanted.  15 kg of pomegranate produced 1 Litre of pomegranate syrup, which explains why the pure stuff is so expensive and difficult to find!

Perfect Pomegranate Syrup

Ok, I notice I'm writing a lot about food lately. Wonder if this blog is taking a turn?

One of the loveliest bits of my Turkish life is nar ekşisi, or pomegranate syrup (literally 'pomegranate sour'), which I buy not from the supermarket, but rather from a man who makes it himself and then sells it in recycled pop bottles out of a 3-metre-square storefront in the old part of town, just a few minutes' walking distance from our house. He also sells his own olives and olive oil, and nothing else.

Nar ekşisi is a staple in every Turkish household, I'd say, and is found on most restaurant tables where a Canadian might expect to find ketchup or vinegar, salt and pepper. It's most commonly used as the acid on salad; so add your olive oil and then, instead of lemon, other citrus, balsamico or any other vinegar, add your nar.

Supermarkets carry several brands, but most have all kinds of additives and don't even contain pure pomegranate, but rather pomegranate 'essence,' which we all know is food industry code for manufactured in a lab somewhere. Look for a natural brand, or even better, a family's homemade version. You'll really taste the difference.