Good Question: What Can I Do With Bulgur Wheat?
As you clean out your pantry, fridge, and freezer during the Kitchen Spring Cure, you’re bound to find extra ingredients here and there that you’d rather use up now than throw away or donate. Sometimes these ingredients are somewhat puzzling and hard to use up all at once. So our Good Questions the rest of this week will focus on a few of these ingredients you’re having a hard time with. Here’s one from reader Nathan.
I ended up buying WAY more bulgur wheat than I needed for a recipe. I now have this sizeable bag of bulgur wheat in my pantry, and I don’t really know what to do with it.
Tabouli for the next five years? Other than that, what can you DO with bulgur wheat? What’s it for, other than to thicken soup (what I used it for) or tabouli?
Bulgur wheat is a cracked wheat that has already been parboiled or precooked, so it will cook quickly and fluff up when steamed or steeped in boiling water. It comes in various sizes of grain; we’ve seen very fine versions and more heavy-grained versions.
Nathan, bulgur is great for a lot of dishes — not just tabbouleh! In fact, one dish I really enjoy is a sort of reverse tabbouleh, with much more grain than parsley; it’s a warm, light vegetarian supper. I also think the dish pictured above looks amazingly good; it’s from Warda at 64 sq ft kitchen, and it’s her mother’s recipe for spicy greens with bulgur. Yum yum!
Here are those recipes, plus a few more from The Kitchn and elsewhere. Overall, try bulgur in any cold or warm grain salad. You can also steam it and serve with sauce like pasta or couscous.
• Warm Wheat Salad (Or, Reverse Tabbouleh)
• My mother’s Spicy Greens with Bulgur (Tchicha bel Khoubiz) (pictured above)
• Yazbek Kibbi
• From the Files: Warm Grain Salads for Fall
• Lentils with Bulgur Wheat and Caramelized Onions: Moujadara with Burghul
• Bulgur Wheat with Dried Cranberries
• D.I.Y. Tabbouleh
Readers? How do you use bulgur?
Related: Good Grains: What Is Buckwheat?