Bulgur

• 1. Introduction

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  Bulgur is a cracked wheat food, and in parts of the Middle East people eat it by the sack. A 2007 study in the Journal of Food Engineering measured how much. In south-eastern Turkey, the average person ate about 25 kilograms of bulgur every year. That was two times the amount of pasta and two and a half times the amount of rice. In the Levant, Arabia, Iran and Iraq, the yearly figure climbed to between 30 and 35 kilograms. Yet in much of the world, this grain is barely known. It goes by the name borghol in some places, and it turns up in Middle Eastern and South Asian kitchens, among others. How is a grain made from wheat turned into something that needs only a soak in water? How old is the idea? And how did one humble ingredient end up in dishes as different as a salad, a porridge and a deep-fried pastry?

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• 2. From Wheat to Grain

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  Raw wheat has to be changed before it becomes bulgur, and the order of the steps matters. First the wheat is parboiled. Then it is de-hulled and dried. Only at the end is it cracked into pieces. The result has a light, nutty flavor that suits both savory and sweet cooking. It also earns an official label. The United States Department of Agriculture recognizes bulgur as a whole grain. Several different wheat species can supply the groats it starts from. Because the grain has already been heated, the cook has very little left to do. Bulgur does not require cooking at all. Soaking in water is all it needs, though it can also go into cooked dishes. The numbers behind the cooked grain say a good deal about why people value it.

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• 3. Inside the Bowl

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  Cooked bulgur is 78% water. Carbohydrates make up 19% of it, protein 3%, and fat is negligible. A reference serving of 100 grams supplies 350 kilojoules of food energy. Uncooked grain looks very different on paper. A study of samples from different sources found some variation, but the pattern was consistent. Protein came to about 9%, moisture to 11% and ash to 1%. Starch was the largest share at about 70%. Between 2 and 2.8 percentage points of that starch was resistant starch, which is considered beneficial. Fibre reached about 7%, and most of it was insoluble fibre, another kind regarded as beneficial. The writers of the study were working with grain whose story goes back thousands of years.

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• 4. Ancient Roots

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  Food historian Gil Marks dates bulgur to circa 4000 BC, in the ancient Middle East. That places it among the first processed foods ever created. Its name carries a trail of languages. The word bulgur is the Turkish pronunciation of the Arabic burghul, written برغل. Arabic in turn borrowed the word from the Persian barghul. Medieval cooks found a use for it that looks surprising today. They made kishk, a preserve of dried yogurt and milk. The Arabic cookbook kitab al-tabikh by Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq contains recipes for it as early as the 10th century. Bulgur then stayed largely unknown in North America for a very long time. It arrived only in the 20th century, carried by Armenian, Syrian and Jewish immigrants.

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• 5. Coarse to Fine

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  Grain size decides what a cook can do with bulgur. Coarse bulgur goes into pottages, the thick, slow-cooked stews of old kitchens. Medium and fine grains have a wider range. They appear as breakfast cereals and in pilavs, breads and salads such as kısır. They also go into dessert puddings such as kheer. A bulgur porridge resembles frumenty, a cracked wheat porridge that was a staple of medieval cuisine. In breads, bulgur adds a whole-grain element. Cooks also reach for it wherever they might otherwise use rice or couscous. It can sit beside other dishes just as pasta or rice would. That flexibility explains why one grain appears in so many national dishes, which differ sharply from place to place.

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• 6. One Grain, Many Tables

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  Bulgur is a main ingredient in kibbeh and in tabbouleh salad. Armenian cooks make it as a pilaf in chicken stock, with or without sautéed noodles. They also cook it with tomatoes, onions, herbs and red pepper. For eetch, a salad similar to tabbouleh, they use finely ground bulgur. In Greece the grain is called πλιγούρι, or pligouri. In Cyprus it is πουρκούρι, or pourkouri, and it becomes κούπες, or koupes. Turkish speakers know the same dish as içli köfte, a variety of kibbeh. Its crust is made of fine bulgur, flour, oil, salt and egg. The filling is ground meat, either beef, pork or both, with onions, parsley and spices. The whole parcel is deep-fried. In Saudi Arabia the local version is called jarish, written جَريش. It is especially common in Nejd and Al-Hasa.

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