Sertaç Dirik’s Turkish dinner party recipes for early spring

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The typical food you get in a Turkish restaurant doesn’t represent how I ate growing up. In restaurants, you’ll often find a certain set of late-summer ingredients — aubergines, courgettes, tomatoes. But Turkish home cooking is very seasonal. At this time of the year, we’ll be cooking with winter greens, rhubarb and foraged ingredients such as wild garlic and nettles.

My dad, Ali, has had the Mangal restaurant in London for 30 years. When I took over as head chef at Mangal 2, my point of reference was the food my mother, Cemile, cooked for us. She’s the unsung hero of our family’s cooking. The recipes here are real Turkish home cooking, with everything done in my mum’s style. Other than the soup and pudding, it’s all designed to be eaten together. There are certain elements you’ll always have with a Turkish meal: a mix of smoky and sour flavours, light and heavy dishes, always some sort of wrapped dish and a yoghurt. It’s only possible to eat these dishes with multiple people, which is why they’re mainly served at home. You’re using your hands, passing food around, you’re naturally forced to have conversations.

I grew up learning how to cook from watching mum’s hands and following her instructions. We would assemble dumplings together, roll vine leaves and fill bulgur wheat casings with lamb and spices. Although I’d cook for her at the restaurant, and often call her to ask specific details about how to make this or that, this meal is actually the first time we’ve prepared a whole spread together since I began to cook professionally. (Often our family gatherings will be catered for by my father on his custom-built grill.) We’ve agreed to rectify this.

All the following recipes require plentiful Maldon Sea Salt. Use sunflower oil for cooking and olive oil for finishing.

Lentil and carrot soup

1. Soak the lentils for roughly an hour in warm water, then strain.

2. Add the onion and garlic to a pan with some oil on medium heat. Add a pinch of salt and begin to sweat, cooking until the onion is slightly caramelised, around five minutes.

3. Add the grated carrots and continue to cook until the carrots are soft, then add the tomato purée. Continue to cook until the purée has roasted well. The aroma will be strong once roasted.

4. Add the white wine and cook on a high heat until all the alcohol has been cooked off.

5. Add your lentils, chicken and onion stock and simmer for an hour with a lid.

6. After an hour, add salt to taste. With a hand blender, lightly blitz the soup until your preferred texture is reached. Serve hot, with lemon squeezed over.

Slow-cooked spring lamb with spices

1. Combine two liters of water and 40g of salt and mix well to make a brine. Place your lamb in with the lemon, bay leaves and rosemary and brine for 12 hours in the fridge, covered with a kitchen towel.

2. Remove from the brine, place on a tray and pat dry.

3. When dry, oil your lamb well and rub with the black pepper and pul biber.

4. Preheat your oven to 200C.

5. Place your lamb on a large oven tray with a rack, then add 200ml or one cup of water to the bottom of the tray. Place parchment paper over the lamb, then seal the tray tightly with foil.

6. Place your lamb in the oven and roast for two and a half to three hours until completely tender. Then cook it uncovered for 10-20 minutes to brown it off.

7. Serve hot.

Onion dolma

For the onion casings

1. Fill up a medium pot with water, leaving just 10cm at the top. Add a healthy sprinkle of salt and bring it to the boil.

2. In the meantime, peel the onions. Slice the top and bottom off the onions and then make a single cut along one side, all the way to the core, as though you were making the first cut of an apple segment. (The individual layers will be the casing for the filling.) Keep the onions intact.

3. Add the onions to the pot and simmer until they begin to soften, roughly five to eight minutes.

4. Remove carefully into a sieve and allow the onions to drain. Keep your cooking water as you’ll need it later.

5. Carefully separate each layer of onion one by one and set aside. If any layers are still hard, just place them back into the hot onion water to soften.

For the filling

1. Soak the rice in water for 20 minutes, then strain.

2. Add the rice to a pan with double its mass in water. Bring it to the boil and simmer for eight to 10 minutes until al dente or 80 per cent cooked.

3. Strain well and let it cool.

4. Add the lamb, rice, onion, garlic, greens, mint, salt and pepper to a bowl and mix well.

Assemble the dolma

1. Hold an onion casing open in the palm of one hand. Add a heaped teaspoon of filling, then with both hands roll it up tightly so the onion is in an oval shape. Set aside. Continue to do this until you have no more fillings or casings. When you get to the small interior layers, feel free to use two casings to roll.

2. Pack the dolma tightly in a deep pan in a single layer. Add a weight or a plate on top.

3. Take 250ml onion water, chicken stock and tomato purée and mix well. Bring to a boil in a pan and pour over the onion dolma (around the edge of the plate or weight) until everything is fully submerged and with an extra half a centimeter of liquid on top. Add a lid to the pan and simmer for 35-45 minutes, until the onions have completely softened.

4. Serve hot.

Börek with wild garlic and mushrooms

For the filling

1. Shallow-fry the oyster mushrooms in 150ml of vegetable oil in a large pan over a medium heat until golden brown. Strain well through a sieve and place on a paper towel, then salt while still warm. Set the mushroom oil aside.

2. Add the onion and finely chopped garlic to the same pan and begin to caramelize. Once golden, add the chestnuts and white mushrooms, a pinch of salt and begin to cook down until all the moisture has been released, about 10 minutes.

3. Add the wild garlic to a hand blender bowl. Add the two cloves of garlic, parsley, lemon juice, 100ml of mushroom oil and a pinch of salt and blend until smooth.

4. Fold the mushrooms and wild garlic purée together and add the spices and seasoning. Let it cool.

For the borek

1. Preheat the oven to 170C.

2. Oil a large flat oven tray.

3. Take two sheets of filo pastry, brush the top layer very lightly with sunflower oil. With a teaspoon, add the mushroom filling lengthways all the way down the filo leaving a 2cm edge from the bottom. You don’t need a lot of filling; a little goes a long way.

4. Carefully roll the filo into a long tube, gently squeezing as you go to make the dough malleable. This will help shape the börek. Once your tube is ready, start to curl your börek into a snail shape. Add to the middle of the tray.

5. Continue to roll out more tubes of the börek. When you have a new tube ready, just roll it around the snail in the large tray, making sure they’re tightly packed until you have no more filo to roll.

6. Melt the butter and combine with the egg yolks, beat well until incorporated and brush over the whole of the börek. Make sure you cover every visible surface and use up all the egg wash. Place the tray into the oven and bake for 25 minutes, or until golden brown.

7. Slice like a pie to serve.

Braised spinach and onion in yoghurt

1. Add your onion and chopped garlic to a pan with oil. Add some salt and cook on medium heat until translucent.

2. Add the spinach and cook until bright green and wilted. Remove immediately from the heat. Add the minced garlic, salt, lemon juice and dried mint to the yoghurt. Mix well, then fold this through your spinach.

3. Serve spread on a plate. Just before eating, brown the butter over medium heat with the pul biber. This will take about three minutes. Then pour over.

Rhubarb and rosemary rice pudding

1. In a large pan, combine the milk, double cream and sugar. Bring to the boil on the stove, then add the rosemary. Simmer for five minutes, then remove from the heat and allow to infuse for an hour.

2. In the meantime, rinse the rice two to three times and strain.

3. Strain the rosemary milk into a pan and add the rice. Bring it to a boil, then lower to a simmer with the lid on. Cook until your rice has expanded completely (45 minutes to an hour). Check on the rice pudding regularly, stirring to ensure it hasn’t caught at the bottom.

4. In the meantime, slice the rhubarb into 10cm batons, then thinly slice the batons. Add the rhubarb to a pan with a teaspoon of sugar. On the lowest heat, just bring the batons up to warm, stirring carefully to keep the rhubarb intact. After four to five minutes, remove from the heat and allow the residual heat to finish cooking the rhubarb.

5. Bowl your rice pudding, add a few spoons of rhubarb and a small mound of honeycomb. Eat hot or cold.