Antep Ezme Recipe - Hot & Spicy Turkish Tomato Salad (2024)

Spicy Antep Ezme: what can we say? Simply, that this ezme recipe is one of our very favourite dishes.

We’re fully aware that we’re always saying different Turkish dishes are favourites for us..

But then another food always springs to mind. And then that’s a favourite, too.

But Antep Ezmesi is one of the originals. An old faithful that’s always been on our meze table.

And, because we loved it so much when we tasted it, an Antep Ezmesi recipe was one of the first Turkish recipes we learned.

Guaranteed To Please

We’re sure if you make spicy (acılı) ezme at home – or if you’ve never tasted it yourself and you try it in a Turkish restaurant – you’ll love it, too.

If you’re a fan of spicy food, that is. Antep ezme is spicy and zingy, yet crisp and refreshing, all at the same time.

And when any friends come out to visit us in Fethiye and we go to the fish market or other local restaurants around town, they’ll go to the meze fridges and their first choice of meze is always Antep ezmesi.

No discussion between any of us. It’s only afterwards that we discuss further choices.

Everyone loves Antep ezmesi.

Some of our friends need to choose vegetarian or vegan dishes and ezme fits in very nicely as a side dish thar we can all happily share.

What is Antep Ezme?

‘Ezme’ is a Turkish word that means ‘crushed’.

You’ll also see the word used to describe any other Turkish food that involves a bit of crushing, smashing up or grinding.

Fasulye ezmesi, for example, is another tasty white bean meze dish.

Antep Ezme is from the southeast of Turkey (Gaziantep).

And, like a lot of other Eastern Turkish dishes, is supposed to be spicy. That means it’s always going to appeal to us as spicy food addicts.

It’s basically a spicy tomato salad dip. The nearest thing we can think of to describe it to you is a hot Turkish salsa dip made with the freshest of ingredients.

It’s a great way to use up tomatoes, too, if you have a glut.

You’ll see spicy ezme in any Turkish restaurant or lokanta that serves mezeler (cold starters) from their fridges.

It’s a staple of Turkish cuisine. Especially in kebab restaurants where it makes a perfect fresh accompaniment to your barbecued meat dishes like chicken şiş.

Some versions have a drizzle of nar ekşisi (pomegranate molasses) but in our neck of the woods, this isn’t often seen – but no reason why you can’t add your own once it’s been served.

If there’s none there, it more than likely means it’s all been bought up.

Homemade Acılı Ezme Is The Best

This, and the types of homemade ezme recipe you’ll find in Turkish cookery books, is much much better quality.

And far more tasty than the product you can buy from the supermarket deli counters in Fethiye.

Antep Ezmesi bought from the deli counters is still tasty but it’s a completely different dish.

For us, too much tomato puree is used rather than fresh, chopped tomato. And you don’t get the same texture or the refreshing flavours on your tongue that top quality tomatoes provide.

It’s more of a tomato paste than an ezme salad and the taste is different, too. You can compare for yourself and decide which you prefer.

No Two Spicy Ezme Salads Are The Same

Antep ezmesi is one of those dishes where no two look the same. You’ll know this if you order it from restaurants, regularly.

The amount of fresh ingredients used and the texture created is down to the individual chef’s own preferences. Some are spicier versions than others!

Sometimes, you can get quite a relatively chunky acılı ezme. Whilst in other places, the ingredients can be almost blitzed and the olive oil is plentiful!

As long as the ingredients are fresh and the tomato paste or pepper paste is not making up the bulk of the dish, we really don’t mind.

We have some favourite go-to places when it comes to spicy ezme and will sometimes just order a portion with fresh bread or Turkish pide bread as nibbles to go with our beer.

Boğaziçi Restaurant along Fethite harbour springs to mind. They do a mean ezme!

Homemade Is Worth The Effort

Now, we need to tell you this.

If you make spicy ezme, we’d be misleading you if we said making your own Antep ezmesi recipe takes no effort.

However, now we have told you that, we can also tell you the taste sensation afterwards is definitely worth your labours.

If you’re desperate to make spicy ezme and you’re in a bit of a rush – or you just can’t be bothered to stand there chopping – you can use a food processor/mixer to chop most of your ingredients.

Except your tomatoes!

You need good quality, ripe tomatoes and you’re going to be chopping these by hand!

Acılı Antep ezmesi is still amazingly good when you’ve used a food processor. But it’s just not quite as a good as when you decide to do some good old chopping by hand.

Texture is the key difference here.

And, if you do use the food processor, be careful not whizz everything into a pulp. Just give it a pulse a few times.

Anyway, let’s get the chopping board out and make spicy Antep Ezmesi.

Antep Ezme Recipe Ingredients

For this delicious recipe, we’re basically going to be chopping lots of lovely fresh ingredients into tiny pieces and mixing them together in a large bowl.

Obviously, we have our ripe tomatoes. We need to peel and deseed these.

This job is easy when you plunge the tomatoes into boiling water for a minute and then plunge them into cold water straight afterwards.

The skin will peel off easily and then you can halve the tomatoes and scoop out the seeds and excess tomato juice with a teaspoon.

We also have:

• Onion – you can use red onion if you like.
• Hot peppers – as many chillies as you can handle. Our recipe says 5. On days when the chillies haven’t been so hot, we’ve added more or some hot red pepper flakes (pul biber).
• Red and green capsicum peppers. In Turkey, we use the red ‘kapya biber’ and the green ‘sivri biber.’ These are the long pointed ones but bell peppers will be fine, too.
• Cucumber – an optional ingredient that we use because some of the local restaurants in Fethiye add it.
• Good quality olive oil. Extra virgin olive oil, if possible.
• Vinegar – or freshly squeezed lemon juice. We use Turkish grape vinegar.
• Salça – just a little bit of tomato paste (domates salçası) or red pepper paste (biber salçası) that will help to thicken up all those lovely juices
• A half bunch of parsley – for some lovely fresh green flavours.
• And a bit of dried mint – it lifts the zing factor.

Chop everything up with a good sharp knife and add it all the bowl.

Mix it up and do a taste test and make any necessary adjustments. We often find the hot chilli flavour is absorbed by other ingredients so we add more afterwards.

And that’s it.

You should now have before you a bowl of bright red loveliness, waiting to be eaten by your guests.

Because Antep ezmesi is great as part of a fabulous summer meze table, with fresh Turkish bread or balloon bread, or, as part of a main meal. It’s a great side to köfte and other grilled meat.

However you make your Turkish spicy ezme, it’s always guaranteed to impress your guests.

And if you are looking for other light Turkish salad dishes, take a look at another famous Gaziantep dish, Gavurdağı Salatası.

Or the famous shepherd salad – also known as choban salad. Purslane and tomato salad is also light and fresh.

Ezme Recipe – How To Make Spicy Antep Ezme

For loads more meze inspiration, take a look at our full Turkish recipe index. Afiyet olsun!