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.
18 of 116 recipes. Clear the filter
Menemen
Pepper, tomato and egg. Know the order and the heat and it takes fifteen minutes; miss them and you get a watery omelette.
Vegetable soup
Throwing everything in at once is easy and wrong. These vegetables differ twofold in cooking time, and knowing the order is the only skill involved.
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.
Saç kavurma
High heat, small pieces, an uncrowded pan. Miss any one of the three and it is not a sauté but a stew.
Beef sauté
A meat dish finished in fifteen minutes, on one condition: the pan is genuinely hot. In a warm pan this recipe does not work.
Chicken sauté
Chicken breast is done at 65 °C and dry at 72. Those seven degrees are the whole recipe.
Chicken curry
Frying the spices in fat is not a step but half the recipe: their aromas dissolve in oil and not in water.
Steamed fish
In a buğulama the fish never touches water: it cooks in the steam the vegetables give off and never sees 100 °C.
İmam bayıldı
Karnıyarık’s sibling: no meat, olive oil, eaten cold. The quantity of onion is not excessive — this is a dish about onion.
Okra in olive oil
Okra goes slimy for one reason: it was cut. Cooked without breaching the pod, it does not go slimy at all.
Fried aubergine
An aubergine can take up a third of its own weight in oil. Salted water halves that.
Borlotti bean pilaki
A pilaki is eaten cold, and that is why there is sugar in it: perception of sweetness drops as food cools, so what tastes right hot tastes flat cold.
White bean salad
The dressing goes on while the beans are HOT. A cold bean takes nothing up; a hot one draws the dressing into its starch.
Black-eyed pea salad
The one dried pulse that needs no soak: its skin is thin and it softens in twenty-five minutes.
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.
Black-eyed pea stew
The one common dried pulse that needs no soaking: its coat is thin and permeable, so it goes from dry seed to tender in twenty-five minutes.
Green lentil salad
A lentil goes on cooking in its own heat for three or four minutes after the pan comes off. The eighteen minutes in this recipe already has those minutes counted in.
Green beans in olive oil
A classic that cooks in the vegetable’s own water, with none added. The secret is patience and a low flame: the beans sweat, they never boil.