Kaşık Salata (Finely Chopped Salad)

Kaşık salata, literally spoon salad, is tomato, cucumber, green pepper, onion and herbs chopped so finely that it is eaten with a spoon rather than a fork, dressed with pomegranate molasses, lemon, olive oil, sumac and red pepper flakes. It is a fixture of kebab houses in Adana, Mersin and across southern Türkiye, where it often arrives on the table free with the bread before the meat. It sits between two better-known salads: çoban salata, the shepherd's salad of the same vegetables in larger dice with no sour molasses, and acılı ezme, which is chopped finer still, bound with pepper paste and much hotter.