Cuisine guide
Turkish
recipes.
Turkish cuisine is one of the most underrated in the world — the inheritor of Ottoman court cooking, which itself absorbed Persian, Arab, Greek, Balkan, and Caucasian influences across six centuries of empire. Modern Turkey is huge and regionally varied: the Aegean coast cooks like a Greek-Italian-Levantine hybrid, the Black Sea is a corn-and-fish culture, the Southeast (around Gaziantep and Antakya) has the cuisine that food writers travel for — kebabs, kunefe, baklava, and a depth of spice work that holds its own against any cuisine on earth. UNESCO has designated Gaziantep specifically as a 'Creative City of Gastronomy.'
Recipes from Turkish
30 dishes to cook from
The shape of the cuisine
Three pillars to anchor what you cook.
Meze and the rakı table
A Turkish meal often starts with a long spread of cold meze — yoghurt-and-cucumber (cacık), eggplant salad (patlıcan salatası), white bean (piyaz), stuffed mussels (midye dolma), grilled vegetables, fresh greens. Hot meze (sigara böreği, içli köfte) follow. All eaten over hours with rakı and slow conversation.
Kebabs and the meat tradition
İskender kebabı (Bursa-style, sliced döner over bread with tomato sauce and yoghurt); Adana kebabı (a long minced-lamb kofta on a flat skewer); şiş kebabı (cubed marinated meat); köfte (Turkish meatballs in many regional styles). The marinades are often yoghurt-based — very different from Middle Eastern kebab cultures.
Pastries, sweets, and bread
Baklava in its Gaziantep form (paper-thin yufka, pistachio, butter, syrup); künefe (cheese-filled, syrup-soaked); lokum (Turkish delight); the breads (pide, lavaş, simit). Turkish breakfast (kahvaltı) is famously elaborate — cheeses, olives, jams, eggs, honey-with-clotted-cream, fresh bread, and tea.
Staple ingredients
The pantry you'll want.
Olive oil and butter in equal measure, Turkish yoghurt, ayran (salty yoghurt drink), tomato paste (salça) and red pepper paste (biber salçası), pul biber (Aleppo-style pepper flakes), sumac, dried mint, cumin, pomegranate molasses, bulgur, rice, lamb, beef, chickpeas, lentils, feta-style beyaz peynir, kaşar cheese, black tea.
You don't need everything at once. Build the pantry over a few months as recipes call for it; most of these are shelf-stable and useful across cuisines.
Core techniques
A few moves to learn well.
- Building tomato-based stews on a long-cooked salça (concentrated tomato + pepper paste)
- Marinating meat in yoghurt + onion juice for tenderness before grilling
- Pilaf cooked with vermicelli or orzo browned in butter first
- Layering yufka or phyllo for börek with feta and herbs