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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Porridge
Five minutes, of which the first one decides everything: the oats go into cold liquid, never into boiling.
Red lentil soup
Turkey’s default soup. Four ingredients, thirty-five minutes and one rule: the lemon is squeezed at the table.
Ezogelin soup
The lentil soup’s cousin, with bulgur, tomato paste and mint. The difference is one step: the paste is fried in the fat.
Tarhana soup
A yoghurt-and-vegetable mixture fermented through a summer, dried and powdered. Ten minutes to a soup — at the end of a year’s work.
Tomato soup
The taste of this soup is the taste of the tomato, which means a bad tomato cannot make a good one. In winter use paste and wait for the season.
Chicken broth soup
What makes a broth clear is not the ingredients but the temperature: a pan that passes 95 °C guarantees a cloudy one.
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.
Flour soup
Three ingredients — flour, butter, water — and all of the flavour is in how long the flour is toasted.
Onion soup
Forty minutes of frying onions sounds long. Stop at thirty and the soup comes out sharp instead of sweet: the time is the recipe.
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.
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.
Lamb and pea stew
The peas go in last. Boiled with the meat from the start they lose both their colour and their texture.
Chicken casserole
Made with thigh, and there is no alternative: breast certainly dries over forty minutes in an oven.
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.
Chicken curry
Frying the spices in fat is not a step but half the recipe: their aromas dissolve in oil and not in water.
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.
Spinach with rice
A kilo of spinach cooks down to a handful, which is why the size of the pan is part of the recipe.
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.
Türlü
The name means "all sorts" and the recipe means it: whatever is in the house goes in. The one rule is the order they cook in.
Sautéed mushrooms
Mushrooms are wiped, not washed. And the salt goes in last: early salt draws their water out and makes browning impossible.
Potato and mince bake
Without a pre-cook the potato slices boil rather than brown over forty minutes in the oven.
Chickpea stew
Dried chickpeas, tomato paste and olive oil — and a pinch of bicarbonate that halves the cooking time.
White beans
Beans stay hard for almost always the same reason: the tomato paste went in early. Acid locks the pectin in the skin.
Green lentil stew
A green lentil keeps its skin and holds its shape; a red one is already skinned and split, so it collapses. The same plant, two different dishes.
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.
Spinach with chickpeas
Under a lid, spinach turns olive-drab in its own acid. With the lid off, the colour and the taste both stay where they were.
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.
Buttered pilaf
Separate grains are not a recipe but two steps: rinse it, and leave the lid alone.
Bulgur pilaf
Bulgur does not cook, it takes up water. It is wheat that has already been boiled, so what matters is not the time on the flame but the time under the lid.
Bulgur pilaf with lentils
Two grains, two rules: the lentils must boil, the bulgur only absorbs. Put them in together and one collapses while the other stays hard.
Tomato bulgur pilaf
The acid in tomato slows how fast bulgur takes up water. The answer is not more water but putting the tomato in after the bulgur has swollen.