AJVAR (Traditional red pepper relish)

Oh dear, autumn has come and with it peppers, yummy, juicy, ripe, blood-red peppers. Thank you Christopher Columbus for the pepper seeds you brought, thank you warm sun that warms up our gardens and the vegetables growing in them, thank you Arab engineers for melioration, thank you Macedonian drivers and an extra thanks to your trucks, which brought these ingredients to us. The sort Kurtowska’s crown can be found here, for a euro and half a kilogram, for a whole bag a bit less. Roll up your sleeves, turn on the fire and turn off your computer, we are going to make ajvar.

The rapturous introduction is a result of a simple thing. I already did 2 rounds of baking and making ajvar and on my balcony there are numerous jars rolling up and down with this delicious spread, which disappears, with a spoon in your hand, faster than the sun can set. This time I will not explain the anthropological and etymological history of the dish. There are just too many questions and non-logical facts, so I please myself with the fact, that the birthplace of ajvar originated in the Balkans. This dish is well known in Beograd, Leskovica, Niš, in the autumn time it cooks in big pots all around the Macedonian yards and even the Bulgarians and Romanians make their version with a lot more other vegetables too. It came to us, to Slovenia, the same way the “čevapčiči” made it to here, all the “pleskavica” patties, “vešalice” and “čorbe” too. An unknown force from the south, you could say, individuals or in groups, which were brought in their luggage, part-time or for good, in every way possible really. Maybe it even came from immigrants, why not? Ajvar is a known dish in our part of the world, so I don’t need to make a really big introduction for it. In stores you can buy at least 4 different sorts, in different sized jars, more or a bit less red, some even claim the spread is made out of real grilled peppers. If we know the true nature of ajvar, we still don’t know the exact structure and taste of a real home-made, authentic ajvar; a sort of ajvar that is made by my cousin Anže or my grandmother Anđa from Bukovica. And what kind of ajvar does my cousin Anže make? Oh god, it is so thick, that the spoon can stand in it. It is made from red peppers, grilled on a fire and smoked with breech wood. The peppers are juicy Kurtowska’s crown, which were grown on the hot Macedonian sun and filled with the taste of fresh flowing mountain rivers. If you look into one jar really good, you won’t find even one seed in it. Not because Anže doesn’t want you to get the satisfaction of eating them, but because his hands work too diligently and he cleans the peppers too perfectly to let even one seed slide by. The peppers are pealed and cleaned only then, when they have been resting for a bit so they let out the excess liquid and the skin is peeling off by itself a bit. Comparing sloppy cleaned peppers and the diligently pickled ones, is like comparing apples and oranges, but firstly also depending on the quality of the peppers (they warry in quality even throughout the year), and the technique of pickling, sorting and cooling, the hands that make them and, non-the-least, also of the patience of the cook making it. Anže cuts the cleaned peppers into stripes and cooks them for some hours in a big pot at low heat. As he steadily mixes the ingredients, he adds vegetable oil, salt and, if I remembered it correctly, pours in some vine vinegar at the end. The result is a pleasantly-smelling, deep red ajvar mass, thick and full of flavor, as if you pressed all of the industrial-made mixes into one. To not only talk about my cousin Anže, I will describe my procedure of making ajvar, a bit more sloppy than my cousin does, with less difficult compromises, which won’t, of course, lead to the title of “Best Ajvar of the Year”, but the jar made by hand will be way better and more flavorful than the ones you can buy in store.

CITY AJVAR V 1.0

For 6 big jars of delicious relish we need:

• 15 kg of meaty and ripe red peppers, the sort Kurtowska’s crown or Rog
• 1 liter unrefined vegetable oil
• rough sea salt

  Baking Rinse the peppers under running water and sort them onto a baking tray. Bake them in a pre-heated oven on 200°C, 15 minutes on one side and 15 minutes on the other. The peppers have to be turned during the bake, so they are baked evenly. Put the baked peppers into a pot with a lid. There, they can cool of slowly, let out some liquid and the skin will peal of the meat (at least we hope it will). Repeat the procedure about 7 times, with the premise, that we put about 2 kg of peppers on the tray each time. Clean the peppers The peppers should rest one whole night in a cold room (or not). Try to peel them as much as possible (or not), remove the seeds from the inner side and put the cleaned bits on a drain, so the water can run out as much as possible. The less water there is, the less time it takes to cook them. Chop the cleaned peppers We have a few choices on how to cut the peppers, from grinding them in a grinder, to using a food processor or just plain chopping with a knife. I myself, choose the processor, with which I removed the skin left on the peppers. And the work was finished in a jiffy. Stewing the ajvar Find the biggest pot you have at home. Fil the bottom of the pot with about 1 dcl oil and heat it. As it begins to boil, put in the cleaned pepper meat and mix them for about 1 hour on low heat, even better 2 or 3 hours just to be sure. When mixing, put in salt. Then try it and mix some more. And mix and try yet some more. Mix and put in oil a bit at a time, as much as the mass absorbs at one time. We will need about 1 liter of oil for 15 kg of peppers. At the end of the cooking process, when the mass is very thick, pour in half a deciliter of red wine vinegar, which will heighten the flavor. Pickling into jars At the end of the cook, heat the jars in the oven along with their lids. Put the temperature to 90°C and let the jars and the lids in the oven for at least 20 minutes. Put the jars out of the oven and spread them on your working bench. Fill the still hot ajvar mix into the jars with a ladle, and bang the jars on the working bench a few times, so the mix can spread in the jar evenly and that there are no air pockets left. Make sure to fill the jars almost to the brim. Close the jars with the lid tightly and put them in the pre-heated oven again, where they should rest in 20min on 90°C, with the lid facing down (I don’t exactly know why). After 20min of pasteurization, turn of the oven and leave the jars in the still hot inner. Put them, the next day, into your storage or in another cold, dark and dry place. In case you are as giving as me, try to use smaller jars the next time, else you won’t have none left for yourself.