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.
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Eggs with sucuk
Crack the eggs before the sucuk has released its fat and you get dry sausage and lean eggs. The order is not a preference, it is the recipe.
Eggs with pastırma
Pastırma is warmed rather than cooked. More than thirty seconds in the pan and the fenugreek crust turns bitter while the meat turns to leather.
Wedding soup
Lamb broth, a liaison, and red pepper butter over the top: yayla soup’s richer cousin, built on stock instead of water.
Analı kızlı
The big stuffed dumplings are the mothers, the small plain ones the daughters. Both are bulgur, both cook in the same pan.
Tripe soup
Three hours of simmering and a liaison. What decides the smell is not the recipe but how well the tripe was cleaned.
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.
Pan-fried meatballs
A meatball holds together because it rested, not because of what went into it. Kneaded mince does not meet the pan without half an hour in the fridge.
İzmir meatballs
Searing the meatballs and then baking them in sauce is two dishes in one: the crust stays outside while the inside drinks the sauce.
Taş kebabı
It is called a kebab and there is no fire in it: two hours in a covered pan in its own juice. Collagen becoming gelatin asks for nothing but time.
Slow-roast lamb shank
Three hours at 150 °C. There is no way to shorten it: collagen becomes gelatin with time rather than with temperature.
Karnıyarık
The one thing that stops an aubergine drinking oil is a soak in salted water: cells full of water leave no room for fat.
Musakka
Turkish musakka has no béchamel: aubergine, mince and tomato in one pan. Confusing it with the Greek version is a common mistake.
Saç kavurma
High heat, small pieces, an uncrowded pan. Miss any one of the three and it is not a sauté but a stew.
Kadınbudu köfte
Half the mince is cooked and half is raw. The cooked half stops it collapsing and the raw half is what binds it.
Albanian liver
Liver must not meet salt before the pan, and must meet flour a minute before it. Two rules, two minutes.
Lamb casserole
The meat has two hours and the vegetables have forty minutes. Put them in together and the vegetables vanish while the meat is still raw.
Roast beef
Not a dish to make without a thermometer. The answer to "how many minutes" depends on the temperature at the centre, not on the weight.
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.
İçli köfte
Whether the shell thins without splitting depends on its temperature: cold bulgur cracks and warm bulgur stretches.
Oven lamb tandır
Four hours at 140 °C, then fifteen minutes at 240. Without the second number the meat is tender and pale.
Pan-seared steak
Thickness decides the cooking time, not weight. A 2 cm steak always takes the same time whatever it weighs.
Vine leaves stuffed with meat
Sarma holds together because the pan is packed, not because the roll is tight. Leave gaps and every one of them opens.
Hasanpaşa köfte
The purée on top is a lid rather than a decoration: in the oven it keeps the meat’s juice in.
Lamb and pea stew
The peas go in last. Boiled with the meat from the start they lose both their colour and their texture.
Potato and mince bake
Without a pre-cook the potato slices boil rather than brown over forty minutes in the oven.
White beans
Beans stay hard for almost always the same reason: the tomato paste went in early. Acid locks the pectin in the skin.
İç pilav
Liver cooked inside the rice goes tough. Seared separately and folded in at the end, it stays tender.