Spiced Ground Meat Wraps with Spicy Turkish Ezme Salad

Making the most of early tomato season

The Capsule Pantry in one sentence: Save money, time, and food waste by adopting a Capsule Pantry approach — a small number of ingredients that form the basis of thousands of different, highly flexible recipes.

If there is one thing Croatia does well, it’s seasonal food. I never feel more connected to what I eat than I do when I spend time here.

Happily, it’s the start of tomato season down here in Split which gets me more excited than pretty much any other fruit-vegetable. Because out-of-season tomatoes suck.

After a heavy weekend of eating out and wine tastings, I wanted to make something fresh and vegetable-heavy.

Enter Ezme salad.

Ezme is a Turkish staple. Recipes vary widely (which is great for the flexibility nature of the Capsule Pantry) but in its essence, it’s a spicy tomato-based salsa with finely chopped bell peppers, parsley, lemon juice, and pomegranate molasses if you can find it. Being in Croatia, I couldn’t find pomegranate molasses — nor would I want to add it to my list of traveling spices — so I left this out. Feel free to do the same.

Ezme is usually made with fresh tomatoes but because we’re at the start of the season, I chose to roast mine first to concentrate the flavors. If it’s not yet tomato season where you live, I’ve included some alternative ideas in the variations section below. There is no reason you couldn’t make this with canned tomatoes for instance.

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Watch me make this salad on TikTok.

I put mine on the side of some freshly made flatbreads, tzatziki, and ground pork spiced with cumin, smoked paprika, garlic, and lemon juice.

You can build this dish any way you like. My husband likes to stuff his bread like a burrito whereas I’m happier making it into a sort of meze-style plate using the bread to dip. You can add lettuce, cucumber, tomatoes and / or hummus to the mix too.

I’ve also included substitutions for the meat. Pork is what I happened to have in the fridge but you can swap for plenty of other things including vegetables.

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Serves 4

Key: Bold = Capsule Pantry ingredients

For the Ezme salad:

• 6 small or 4 large ripe tomatoes