Recipes

Scaled to however many of you there are.

Change the headcount and the amounts follow. Salt and spice do not scale in a straight line, and we account for that.

A recipe is how you make a thing: the amounts, the order, the timing and where it goes wrong. The dish pages explain what that thing is — where it comes from, the mechanism behind it, and why skipping one step makes it something else. One stays open in the kitchen; the other is read when you wonder.

Main ingredient

With chicken 11 With red meat 27 With fish and seafood 9 With aubergine 8 With yoghurt 13 With cheese 8 With lentils 7 With chickpeas 8 With beans 10 With bulgur 11 With rice 10 With pasta 6 With tomato 51 With spinach 3 With mushrooms 6 With potato 17 With egg 22 With courgette or pumpkin 6

Character

Sweet 5 Hot 13 Sour 34

Method

In the oven 24 Grilled 4 Fried 30 No cooking 5

What it is

Under 30 minutes 29 One pot 54 Vegetarian 62 Vegan 32 Gluten free 50 Freezes 62

13 of 116 recipes. Clear the filter

Çılbır

Poached eggs on garlicky yoghurt, finished with butter sizzled with chilli. Three temperatures stacked: warm yoghurt, running yolk, scalding fat.

15 min 478 kcal

Ezogelin soup

The lentil soup’s cousin, with bulgur, tomato paste and mint. The difference is one step: the paste is fried in the fat.

40 min 279 kcal

Ali Nazik

The Gaziantep classic: charred aubergine crushed with garlicky yoghurt under sautéed lamb. Everything rests on properly charring the aubergine — made with oven-roasted aubergine, this is simply not the dish.

55 min 502 kcal

Albanian liver

Liver must not meet salt before the pan, and must meet flour a minute before it. Two rules, two minutes.

25 min 570 kcal

İçli köfte

Whether the shell thins without splitting depends on its temperature: cold bulgur cracks and warm bulgur stretches.

120 min 1084 kcal

Çiğ köfte, without meat

The name says raw, but the bulgur is not: bulgur is wheat that has already been boiled, and here it is only soaked.

85 min 450 kcal

Garlic-sautéed broccoli

The broccoli is blanched two minutes and dropped into iced water. That shock locks the green in, and the sauté cannot take it back out.

20 min 220 kcal

Red lentil patties

The bulgur goes onto the lentils while they are HOT, under a lid. Added to cold lentils it never swells and the patty falls apart.

80 min 421 kcal

Green lentil stew

A green lentil keeps its skin and holds its shape; a red one is already skinned and split, so it collapses. The same plant, two different dishes.

65 min 496 kcal

Red lentil dal

Twenty minutes of boiling lentils tastes of very little; almost all of the flavour is made in the last forty-five seconds, in hot fat.

37 min 315 kcal

White bean patties

There is no protein network here to bind the patty. What takes its place is gelatinised starch, which firms as it cools: the fridge is what holds these together.

130 min 503 kcal