Ajvar: Community Pepper Peeling

Oui! How is it that every muscle in my body hurts?! It's amazing how sore you get while making Ajvar.... between hunching over and peeling, peeling, peeling and four-hours of stirring, stirring, stirring it's no wonder! Our second day making the local specialty went really well and was full of fun. Here's a picture diary of our day which began with:

Roasting peppers until they're black and easy to peel... this time with the stems on in order to do a comparison of methods used by locals... more to come on the verdict in another blog...
Beginning the pepper-peeling process....

Prepare shish-kabob's for lunch

Quickly move everything inside because the previously sunny day disappeared in a torrent of rain!... and peel more peppers

Roast eggplant (aka "black tomatoes")

Pause for lunch under the once-again clear skies.... the carrots and cherry tomatoes in the salad were fresh from the garden!

Continue to peel peppers and now eggplant (eggplant is by far the hardest to peel btw)...

Begin to grind the peppers and eggplant... don't you just love the innovation of using a drill vs. hand-cranking!?! Zip zip! It went so fast!

Continue peeling and grinding while beginning to stir the mix on the stove... adding 1 liter (!) of oil to start...


Chop fresh parsley from the garden and garlic for the ajvar beginning to boil on the stove..

Short break for early blackberry birthday pie for Pattie and myself [thank you!!].... while still peeling!

More peeling!

Finished the peeling and now finishing up the grinding!!

Now the brewing begins! We needed to cook this mixture until it's 1/2 this size!

That means... four HOURS of stirring... and stirring... and stirring..... Once the mixture had cooked down, thickened and darkened, we brought it all upstairs to begin spooning into freshly sanitized, prepared jars...

It's hard to believe that 75 kilos of peppers and 20 of eggplant boiled down to 20 small jars and 5 large jars of Ivar! (Or as my brother and nephews teasingly pronounced... Ajuh-bep... the Englishification of the Cyrillic for Aye-var... Ајвар)

If you're counting jars in this picture you'll notice there's only 4 large jars... that's because we ate one while it was warm! It's so yummy to slather warm Ivar on bread and top it with some sirinje (a creamy feta-type cheese). MmmmMmmm...

By far, the best thing about making Ajvar, though, are the hours of fellowship, laughs, conversation and community-building among participants enjoying each other, the work and the day. :) Besides making Ajvar with colleagues, I've twice had the priviledge of making Ajvar with a Macedonian family from church. I loved sitting at the stove with the dad and chatting while monitoring the peppers process and adding more when others were done... or the laughter and conversation that happened with everyone around the pepper-peeling on a crisp autumn day. Making ajvar is one of those very special community activities and something I look forward to now each year.

Though I could go another year before I peel another pepper! lol ;)