Recipe - Ajvar

• Ingredients:
• 3 red peppers
• 1 small eggplant
• 1 small onion
• 3 cloves garlic
• 2 red chili peppers
• olive oil
• chili powder
• salt, pepper

Preparation:

Wash, quarter, and remove seeds from peppers. Grease a baking sheet or a large casserole with some olive oil and distribute the peppers with the skin side up.

Place baking pan in a preheated oven at 220° C and bake the peppers until the skin becomes dark and blisters form. Don’t be concerned if the skins become a bit dark.

Remove baking pan from oven and let stand covered with a damp paper towel for ca. 10 minutes. Peel peppers. Removing the skin should now be very easy. Discard skin and finely dice flesh.

Peel eggplant and dice finely. Peel and dice onion and garlic. Finely cut up chili peppers.

Heat some olive oil in a fry pan and sweat onions and garlic until translucent. Add diced eggplant and chili peppers and simmer over low heat for 5-10 minutes. With a hand blender or mixer, mix into a rather coarse eggplant purée and pour into a bowl.

Stir in the diced peppers. Season ajvar with salt, pepper, olive oil, and perhaps some chili powder.

Note: The ajvar can also be mixed to a fine purée if desired. Just add peppers when mixing the eggplant and blend a bit longer. But the chunky ajvar simply tastes better!

Ajvar, which is also often written as Ajwar, is originally a pure pepper purée. It is presumed to originate from the Balkan cuisine. Ajvar is a tasty side dish with lamb and other meat dishes. It tastes best, of course, when the meat has been barbecued. I prepared it with a bit of eggplant for a variation in taste, but this can of course be omitted.

I served cevapcici with djuvec rice, a large piece of feta cheese, onions and of course homemade ajvar as a side dish.

Recipes: ajvar • barbecue • croatian • hot • pepper • yugoslavian

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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