Turkish Salce – a handy tomato sauce

turkish-salce-picture

Having salce (saljeh) on hand sure makes cooking Turkish easy. Keep a container in the freezer and just take out a spoonful as needed.  Salce is used in recipes coming soon to this blog: dolma (green peppers stuffed with rice, parsley and salce), Turkish French fries (salce is so much better than ketchup!), mercimek (lentil soup), and easy chickpeas. Salce is full of cancer-fighting lycopene. It’s used a spice paste, so it’s very salty and spicy.

Most families I knew in Turkey dried their tomatoes in the sun on the roof of the house. But, we will use tomato paste.

salce-ingredients

You need: 1 small can tomato paste

1 teaspoon fresh chili sauce (or more) You can substitute with the chili you usually cook with- chili powder, blatt paprika or fresh green chili- adjust the amount but make it very hot.

1 teaspoon salt

Mint (optional) 2 teaspoons dried or 1/2 cup chopped fresh.

1-      Heat:  2-3 Tablespoons olive oil in a pan (Tomato really picks up iron in a cast iron pan)

2-      “Kill” the tomato paste by adding it to the hot oil and stir to mix.

3-      Add chili and salt. When the tomato has absorbed most or all of the oil, add the mint.

It should taste very salty and spicy-hot.

4 thoughts on “Turkish Salce – a handy tomato sauce

  1. Pingback: More uses for Turkish salce - Laurie Fraser

  2. Love Turkish food. Had a holiday inTurkey a couple of years ago and just loved the food. Would love some simple receipes to add to my favorites thank you. Look forward to hearing from you. I have a receipe with needed salcha. I see its spelt salce so found this on the net

    • Hi Sheila- thanks for stopping by! Yes, these recipes are super-simple. I lived in a small village and no one had much money- meat was only for special occasions.

      • Also, I want to mention: “c” in Turkish sounds like “j”. If the c has a little cedilla or tail under it, is pronounced “ch”. Therefore, beautiful in Turkish is spelled Cok guzel, but it is pronounced Chok guzel and salce, that versatile sauce, is pronounced “salje”.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>