About Duru Lezzetler

Duru lezzetler means "pure flavours" in Turkish, and that is the whole idea of this site. The food that Turkish families cook every day is rarely complicated. A bowl of red lentil soup with a spoonful of pepper butter on top, a tray of köfte, aubergines slumped in olive oil, a stack of flatbreads from a dry pan, a pudding with a browned top. What makes it good is a handful of habits: how long the onions cook, how hot the pan should be, how long to let a dough rest, when the salt goes in. Those habits are what we try to write down.

What you will find here

Recipes first, across the whole Turkish home table: soups, meze and salads, mains from köfte and dolma to slow stews, breads and pastries, desserts, and the pilafs, beans and lentils that sit beside all of them. Around them, kitchen notes on technique and ingredients: what pepper paste does, how to cook dried chickpeas from scratch, why a pilaf rests under a towel.

Every recipe gives amounts in cups and spoons and in grams and millilitres, and oven temperatures in Celsius with Fahrenheit alongside. Ingredients are named plainly, so you can shop for them at a Turkish grocer, a Middle Eastern shop or a well-stocked supermarket anywhere.

Who writes it

Five home cooks with roots in different corners of Turkey, now cooking in Bristol, Lisbon, Frankfurt, Rotterdam and Toronto. Ayla writes about köfte, meze and slow dishes the Gaziantep way, Bora about olive-oil dishes and mezes from the Aegean, Nuray about soups and beans, Murat about pantry science, breads and weeknight planning, and Defne about puddings, pastry and festive tables. None of us is a professional chef. We cook for families and friends, test things more than once, and write down what worked. You can read more about each of us on the cooks page.

How we work

We cook every recipe before it goes up and write it in our own words. We do not give medical or diet advice, and we do not count calories. When we get something wrong, tell us through the contact page and we will fix it in the recipe with a note.

Some pages carry a clearly marked partner box, for example a cookbook shop. If you buy through one, the site may earn a small commission at no cost to you. Partners never choose or review what we cook.

Afiyet olsun, and enjoy your meal.