Beyond bulgur

Bulgur goes global! It is not that the whole world suddenly woke up and discovered our favorite staple food, but it was the occasion that bulgur was the main ingredient on the menu of the Global Table Program at Yale University. Our celebrated social gastronomy hero, Chef Ebru Baybara Demir, was honored with the title of Global Table Fellow 2025. She was recently awarded the title of Global Food Hero by the United Nations and previously received the prestigious Basque Culinary World Prize 2023, given by Basque Culinary Center. She is also the leader of the From Soil to Plate Cooperative and the creator of numerous projects championing heritage ingredients and has helped to create an e-commerce platform for local farmers. One astounding project of hers is the nationwide implementation of a biodegradable waste management project. She was among the very first to come to the rescue of disaster-struck masses following the devasting earthquake that hit Türkiye and Syria on February 6, 2023. Further to providing urgent aid serving food, she established Gönül Mutfağı, a soup kitchen that provided over 20 million hot meals to victims with the help of 4,000 volunteers, private organizations, and public institutions. Her selection as a Global Table Fellow is a wise choice as she is the ultimate source of inspiration.

Connect through global table

Global Table is a collaboration between the Yale MacMillan Center, the Yale Schwarzman Center, and Yale Hospitality. The program aims to create connections between global topics such as sustainability, health, culture, and community by bringing culinary thought leaders from around the world to campus. Each year a chef is entitled as a Global Table Fellow who is invited to train staff, give talks to connect with students and researchers, and assist a reception with a menu. In its second year, for the spring term, the program chose Ebru Baybara Demir from Türkiye for her numerous projects in the field of social gastronomy. Last year, it was Selassie Atadika, from Ghana, Africa, who received this title for the first time, and next, it will be Buddhist nun and chef Jeong Kwan from South Korea for the fall term. During her residency, Chef Ebru delivered a lecture on February 10, 2025, titled “Food is a Tool for Change: A Chef’s Commitment to Transforming Communities and Cultivating Sustainability in Türkiye”, at MacMillan’s Luce Hall, which was immediately followed by a reception at the Schwarzman Center’s The Well. Her menu featured bulgur as a main ingredient, both the coarse and fine varieties, to showcase the amazing versatility of bulgur, from vegan patties to bulgur pilaf and beyond.

Persistence and perseverance

These two words may be the best to summarize Ebru Baybara Demir. She chose the path less traveled with an almost instinctive dedication a quarter of a century ago. Since then, she has been working persistently, with unbreakable perseverance. When I first met her in Mardin in 1999, she was a tour guide who organized the most creative immersive cultural tours with her relentless energy. Sometimes she would set up a table in Hasankeyf right in the Tigris River, making people kick off their shoes and sit at a table with their feet in the water. At other times, she would have all the ambassadors to Türkiye and Ankara protocol squat cross-legged on giant kilim cushions in the courtyard of the Kasımiye Medrese in Mardin and eat at floor tables. On all the tables she set up in those odd places obviously without a kitchen, she always had women do the cooking at their homes, creating a source of income for them. Back then, I was not a food writer, but the director of the World Bank’s Türkiye Cultural Heritage Project, as an architect specialized in cultural heritage preservation and one of the components I strongly defended was Mardin. Whenever we were in trouble persuading the WB mission, we would show Ebru as an inspirational example: “Look, this woman can achieve great things, we should emphasize gastronomy and women’s labor in our projects, we should empower women like Ebru!” Ebru acted faster than us at that time and opened her first restaurant in 2000, Cercis Paşa Konağı in Mardin, without any support from the project. Soon, it became the sole food destination for every single visitor to Mardin. Her path on the road less traveled was bumpy as she faced many obstacles and sometimes opposition, but she always persisted and persevered. She recreated her life from scratch as a woman chef in Mardin, but she didn’t stop there, she produced countless projects, eventually receiving countless awards for them. Today, when I look at all the accolades she has received, I feel proud having witnessed her rough road, and I remember how far she has come since then, step by step, but never once giving up or stopping. And sometimes, I can’t help but laugh. She finally succeeded in feeding bulgur to Americans, which we suggested as one ingredient that we could offer to global tables, which seemed like a utopian dream to the World Bank mission at the time. Congrats old friend, our all-women PMU (Project Management Unit) girls are proud of you!

Why bulgur?

When asked for a menu for the Global Table program Ebru chose special dishes based on bulgur, a very smart move to bring bulgur to the attention of world chefs. As of March 2025, Yale Hospitality restaurants and canteens, which serve 22,000 students a day, will offer a menu designed by Chef Ebru. Bulgur is almost unknown in Europe and especially in America. Chefs around the globe don’t know what it is and how to use it. Often, they think of it as a completely different type of grain, not knowing that it is made from wheat. Bulgur is often described as cracked wheat which is misleading. It is a parboiled and dried wheat that is usually cracked or ground to various levels of coarseness or fineness, and sometimes even left whole. The wheat soaks up all the cooking juices, absorbing all the earthy goodness of the grain. After the drying process, it is available to be cooked just like rice or any other cereal, but especially the finer versions can easily be incorporated into various dishes without being further cooked. It is versatile, healthy, nutritious and open to new creations. In Turkish cuisine, it is used in many ways, from soups to even desserts, not only as pilaf, but also raw, from salads or the ubiquitous kısır, or içli köfte, stuffed meatballs or formed into meatless bulgur patties. The taste of bulgur also varies depending on the type of wheat, the heirloom varieties offer a completely different taste sensation. It offers an infinite variety of uses and offers a great option for vegan and vegetarian diets. In a sense, bulgur is a miracle that the world has yet to discover, and I can say that this discovery has already commenced by the Yale global table!