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 9 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 15 Sour 35

Method

In the oven 24 Grilled 4 Fried 30 No cooking 5

What it is

Under 30 minutes 28 One pot 56 Vegetarian 61 Vegan 31 Gluten free 50 Freezes 62

13 of 116 recipes. Clear the filter

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.

12 min 416 kcal

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.

10 min 293 kcal

Wedding soup

Lamb broth, a liaison, and red pepper butter over the top: yayla soup’s richer cousin, built on stock instead of water.

90 min 385 kcal

Tripe soup

Three hours of simmering and a liaison. What decides the smell is not the recipe but how well the tripe was cleaned.

210 min 230 kcal

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.

100 min 595 kcal

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.

135 min 582 kcal

Musakka

Turkish musakka has no béchamel: aubergine, mince and tomato in one pan. Confusing it with the Greek version is a common mistake.

70 min 445 kcal

Saç kavurma

High heat, small pieces, an uncrowded pan. Miss any one of the three and it is not a sauté but a stew.

35 min 490 kcal

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.

175 min 739 kcal

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.

30 min 416 kcal

Lamb and pea stew

The peas go in last. Boiled with the meat from the start they lose both their colour and their texture.

115 min 531 kcal

Potato and mince bake

Without a pre-cook the potato slices boil rather than brown over forty minutes in the oven.

80 min 550 kcal

White beans

Beans stay hard for almost always the same reason: the tomato paste went in early. Acid locks the pectin in the skin.

95 min 395 kcal

What to cook