Erik ekşisi
Also known as plum sour, sour plum paste, erik eksisi, erik salçası, erik salcasi, Malatya erik ekşisi
Quick answer
Sour plums boiled, strained and thickened to a paste that keeps through the winter, used in Malatya and Çorum to sour soups and stews. Dried sour plums do the same work. It is a souring agent beside verjuice and pomegranate molasses, and not a sauce.
- Tastes of
- sour, fruity
- Heat
- Scoville does not apply
- Goes with
- Chicken
Other names
What this spice is called elsewhere, and where the translation is not clean.
erik ekşisi
Turkish — Malatya
Literally "plum sour". The registered Malatya product of this name is plum juice thickened in the sun and salted.
erik salçası
Turkish — Çorum
Literally "plum paste": the sieved pulp boiled with salt to a jelly. Salça is the word for tomato and pepper paste.
nerdek
Turkish — Gökköy, Çorum
Given, with urup at İskilip, as a local name for the unsalted plum sour; the study takes both from a dictionary of local words that was not read.
Flavour and aroma
Sour. The people asked in Çorum said the plum gives a dish sourness, a sweet-sour edge and a taste and smell of its own, and the study calls the fresh fruit very sour and somewhat bitter until it ripens. No tasting panel and no measurement of acids was read.
A paste of jelly thickness in Çorum. The Malatya registration does not say how thick its product is, only that it is gathered from the trays and put in jars.
Heat
Pungency scale: none — this spice is not pungent
No heat.
Pairings
Ranked by how well established the combination is, with the reason and the caveats attached.
Foods
Chicken
GoodIn Çorum the dish called ekşili is bone-in chicken fried with onion and then simmered with sour plum, as dried fruit, paste or sour, with water, salt and pepper; the people asked said the plum is there for sourness and flavour. Some make it with minced meat, and one village thickens it with flour.
How: Simmered with chicken and onion in ekşili
One province, from interviews at its markets in 2020 and 2021.
Preparation and use
Stirred into the pot with the liquid. The Çorum study describes the dried plum, the paste and the sour as used in the same way, the pressed sheets of dried pulp being thinned with water first.
A souring agent for cooked dishes. In Çorum it goes into grain soups, a chicken stew, okra, leeks and purslane, where the people asked said it gives sourness and a flavour of its own; in Malatya the registration calls it a flavouring for many dishes. It is cooked into the dish, not served beside it.
Storage and freshness
| Form | Good for | Conditions | Fridge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paste | Not established | In jars, somewhere cool that the sun does not reach, where the Malatya registration gives the salted sour twelve months. In Çorum the unsalted sour is bottled and kept in the refrigerator or a cool place. | — |
| Dried whole | Not established | Dry and closed. | — |
Forms
These forms differ enough to need separate answers: treating them as interchangeable produces a dish that is wrong.
Plum sour and plum paste
The boiled, strained fruit thickened and jarred: salted in Malatya and in the Çorum paste, unsalted in the bottled Çorum sour.
Dried sour plums
Sun-dried halves or slices, with the stone or without, soaked or cooked into the same dishes.
Commonly confused with erik ekşisi
Direct comparisons, each with the difference that actually changes what you cook.
Botany
The Çorum study names its wild plum Prunus divaricata, a name the GBIF taxonomy treats as a synonym of the cherry plum. The Malatya registration lists eleven local plums by their variety names and gives no species, so this name is established for Çorum alone.
Rosaceae
The Çorum plum is a wild tree up to 10 m tall that grows between 700 and 2,500 m. Its fruit begins to ripen from the end of August, is yellow, orange or reddish purple and tastes very sour. The plums registered for Malatya weigh 12.63 to 29.17 g and are 28.6 to 43.7 mm long.
Commonly confused with
Nar ekşisi, the other fruit sour of the same kitchens and called by the same Turkish word. It is pomegranate juice boiled dark and is sweet as well as sour; plum sour is salted in Malatya and nothing sweet is added to it.
Tkemali
The Georgian sour-plum sauce, made of a related fruit with herbs, garlic and chilli and served at the table. A sauce with a composition of its own, which this catalogue does not hold; plum sour is the fruit alone, with or without salt.
How it is grown
The plant, how it is propagated and farmed, what threatens the crop, and where it is produced now. Crop diseases here are plant health, not food safety.
How it is grown is not yet described. A paste of boiled sour plums. The plum is not held as a crop, and the two sources read are a registration and a study of market-goers that say when the fruit ripens and where it is picked, not how the tree is grown.
Where it comes from and how it is made
- Türkiye (Malatya province) — notable producer. Where the name Malatya erik ekşisi has been registered since 2022.
- Türkiye (Çorum province) — use or gathering documented here. Where a study recorded wild plums gathered and kept as paste in the centre and seven districts.
In Malatya the plums are in full flower in the second half of April and picking begins between 15 July and 15 September, by variety; they are made into sour as soon as they are picked. In Çorum the wild plums are sold fresh at the Saturday market from mid-August to the end of October, turning from dark green through orange to red.
- Boiling and straining — The washed plums are boiled in water and passed through a strainer, which holds back the stones and skins.
- Thickening — In Malatya the strained juice is set out in thin trays in the sun for two or three days and stirred morning and evening. In Çorum the sieved pulp is boiled again until it sets like a jelly.
- Salting — Salt is stirred into the Malatya sour before it is put in jars, and into the Çorum paste before its second boiling. The registration allows nothing else to be added. The other Çorum product, bottled as it is, has no salt, sugar or grape molasses in it.
The Malatya registration reckons about 5 kg of sour from 30 kg of plums, with 380 g of salt.
Orchard plums in Malatya, wild plums in Çorum. Of the people asked in Çorum, 176 picked the fruit from the mountains around their villages, a few from their own vineyards, gardens and fields, and 28, the older ones, bought it at market.
Buying and quality
The paste and the dried fruit sour the same dishes; the paste is ready to stir in and the dried fruit has to cook.
- For the registered Malatya product: plums, water and salt and nothing else on the label.
- Whether it is salted, which decides how much salt the dish needs.
Grading systems, and who stands behind them
Malatya erik ekşisi: the registered description (Turkish geographical indication)
Designation specificationTurkish Patent and Trademark Office (register); Yeşilyurt Municipality (registrant) · Applies in Malatya province, Türkiye · Required to use the name · Registration no. 1148, protected from 23 September 2021 and registered 10 June 2022 · Geographical indication
The registered rules of one protected name. They bind producers who use that name and are not a standard for the spice in general.
The registration defines a plum sour made from eleven named local plums, water and salt, with no additive. The plums are washed, boiled in water, rested and strained free of their pulp; the juice is set in thin chrome trays in the sun, stirred in the cool of morning and evening, and after two or three days is gathered, salted and jarred. Every stage must take place in the province. The inspection checks the plum varieties, the other ingredients and the method.
| Grade | Criteria |
|---|---|
| Plums allowed | Tozlu (İncaz eriği), Üzüm eriği, Hüvenk eriği, Al erik, Dutdüştü, Bardak, Gelinboğan, Hacıahmet, Hızan, Güzlük can eriği and Mardik, grown in the province. |
| Composition | For 30 kg of plums, 20 litres of water and 380 g of salt, giving about 5 kg of sour. Nothing else is added. |
| Keeping | Twelve months in a cool place out of the sun. |
What it tells you: That a jar under this name was made in Malatya province from local plums, water and salt alone. It sets no figure for acidity, salt in the finished sour or thickness. It is the rule for one protected name and says nothing of plum sours made elsewhere.
History and trade
A household product in Çorum, where the study found no herbalist or spice seller in the town stocking the plum; the fresh fruit is sold by villagers at the Saturday market and the dried fruit by two or three of them through winter and spring. In Malatya the name was registered in 2022.
Culture
Recorded by tradition rather than merged into one narrative — these are genuinely different practices.
Çorum province, Türkiye
A study that interviewed 227 people, nearly all of them at the markets of Çorum, Alaca, Sungurlu and Uğurludağ between September 2020 and February 2021, found the wild plum kept in seven ways and put into more than thirty dishes for sourness. It goes, dried, as paste or as sour, into a winter soup made with cracked wheat, bulgur or rice, called ekşili çorba, and into ekşili, in which bone-in chicken is fried with onion and simmered with the plum, salt and pepper. One person said she or he uses it in okra in place of lemon and citric acid, and another in a dish of the wild green madımak in place of tomato paste. An earlier account of the province’s cooking, which the study cites, says citric acid has largely taken its place.
- Stirred into ekşili çorba, a sour winter soup of grain
- Simmered with chicken and onion in ekşili
- Used in okra in place of lemon
Malatya province, Türkiye
The registration says the sour has an important place in the cooking of the province and is used as a flavouring in many dishes. It names none.
- Used as a flavouring in cooked dishes
What it is called
- Turkish: yonuz eriği
- Turkish: ekşili
What we do not know
Published openly. A gap we have named is more useful than a gap we have filled with plausible prose.
Not yet established for erik ekşisi:
- Archaeological evidence
- Historical timeline
- Ceremonial use
- Traditional medicinal context
- Regulatory limits
- Traditional uses