Turkish lentil soup

I will risk lameness by admitting that I think I like canned chickpeas better than their dried, soaked-overnight counterparts. I only needed a ¼ cup of them for the Turkish lentil soup recipe, but even still, they and the hummus played hell with my digestive system. I didn’t notice any improvement in flavor—the dried, cooked chickpeas tasted just like the canned ones—though their texture was definitely a little firmer than the canned kind. In this recipe, there’s really no need to use the dried, as everything gets all mushy in soup anyway.

 

This soup had a lot going for it, though. The cooked bulgur wheat gave this a really nice, almost creamy texture, more like a thick, grainy stew than a soup. The addition of coriander and mint gave it a deep, complex, exotic flavor that I really liked. But that complexity was completely burned out after a few bites with the huge amount of cayenne pepper in the recipe. I’m talking a teaspoon and a half for only four cups of soup. That is spicy. I like spicy foods fairly well, but when they’re so spicy that you can’t taste anything else other than spiciness, I’ll pass. Still, this was a really nice recipe for a weeknight dinner that I will gladly make again, only this time with about half as much cayenne.

Done