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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Analı kızlı
The big stuffed dumplings are the mothers, the small plain ones the daughters. Both are bulgur, both cook in the same pan.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.