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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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.
Crushed potatoes with yoghurt
Boil, crush, roast. A rough surface means more crust.
Tahini and honey bowl
Two ingredients, five minutes. It seizes as you stir; keep going and it loosens.
Çılbır
Poached eggs on garlicky yoghurt, finished with butter sizzled with chilli. Three temperatures stacked: warm yoghurt, running yolk, scalding fat.
Cheese omelette
The colour of an omelette is a choice: pale means a low flame and brown means a high one, and the second is an accident.
Menemen
Pepper, tomato and egg. Know the order and the heat and it takes fifteen minutes; miss them and you get a watery omelette.
Fried eggs in butter
Eight minutes and one number: the butter must not pass 150 °C.
Spinach and eggs
Crack the eggs before the spinach has given up its water and a green puddle collects on the plate.
Red lentil soup
Turkey’s default soup. Four ingredients, thirty-five minutes and one rule: the lemon is squeezed at the table.
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.
Broccoli soup
One rule for keeping it green: no lid, and not a minute over eight.
Pumpkin soup
Boiled pumpkin gives a watery, flat soup. Roasted pumpkin is the same vegetable and a completely different soup.
Celeriac soup
Celeriac starts browning the moment it is cut. Dropping it into acidulated water is a chemical intervention rather than a cosmetic one.
Fish soup
A fish stock is made in twenty minutes and ruined in twenty-five. Unlike meat stock, long cooking here does damage.
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.
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.
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.
Chicken sauté
Chicken breast is done at 65 °C and dry at 72. Those seven degrees are the whole recipe.
Whole roast chicken
The breast is ready at 65 °C and the leg at 75. Roasting a whole bird is entirely the business of hitting both at once.
Chicken pilaf
When the water for the rice is the water the chicken cooked in, the dish becomes something else. Made with plain water, the same recipe is only rice.
Poached chicken
There is one reason poached chicken comes out dry: the water was boiling. Poached at 80 °C it never does.
Chicken curry
Frying the spices in fat is not a step but half the recipe: their aromas dissolve in oil and not in water.
Baked sea bass
A whole fish is more forgiving than a fillet: the bones and skin slow the heat and the flesh cooks without drying.
Steamed fish
In a buğulama the fish never touches water: it cooks in the steam the vegetables give off and never sees 100 °C.
Grilled sea bream
Fish sticks to a grill because of its skin, not the bars: wet skin welds and dry skin releases in thirty seconds.
Baked salmon
The white stuff on baked salmon is a sign of too much heat rather than of freshness. Pulled at 52 °C it never appears.
İmam bayıldı
Karnıyarık’s sibling: no meat, olive oil, eaten cold. The quantity of onion is not excessive — this is a dish about onion.
Tray-roasted vegetables
A vegetable that does not fit on the tray does not roast, it steams. Using two trays instead of one is the only trick in this recipe.
Roasted cauliflower
Boiled, cauliflower’s sulphur smell goes into the water; roasted, the same compounds turn into a toasted flavour.
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.
Leeks in olive oil
Leek grit hides between the layers and rinsing does not reach it: it has to be cut first and soaked after.
Fried courgette
Salt the slices and wait twenty minutes: the water that comes out is the only reason a fried slice spits and goes soft.
Fried aubergine
An aubergine can take up a third of its own weight in oil. Salted water halves that.
Sautéed mushrooms
Mushrooms are wiped, not washed. And the salt goes in last: early salt draws their water out and makes browning impossible.
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.
Oven potato wedges
The secret of a crisp wedge is not in the oven but before it: a boil and a shake. Without roughening the surface there is no crust.
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.
Hummus
Smooth hummus is not a question of the blender but of the skins: no machine makes it velvety while they are still on.
Broad bean purée
Broad beans are not boiled in their skins: the skin cooks but never chews, and the purée comes out gritty.
Black-eyed pea salad
The one dried pulse that needs no soak: its skin is thin and it softens in twenty-five minutes.
Roasted chickpeas
The crunch is drying, not browning: while there is free water on the surface the chickpea stays soft. The spices wait until the end, because at 200 °C they burn.
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.
Buttered pilaf
Separate grains are not a recipe but two steps: rinse it, and leave the lid alone.
İç pilav
Liver cooked inside the rice goes tough. Seared separately and folded in at the end, it stays tender.