Menemen Turkish Scrambled Eggs

Name: Menemen Recipe: Turkish Eggs with Tomatoes and Peppers
Prep time: 10 min
Cook time: 30 min
Total time: 40 min
Cuisine: Middle Eastern
Ingredients: Eggs 4; Tomatoes 4-5; Bell peppers 2; Onion 1; Butter 30 g; Olive oil 2 tbsp; Salt to taste; Dried herbs 1-2 pinches, optional; Sweet paprika flakes 0.5 tsp, optional; Bread, fresh herbs for serving

☆ 4.5

40 mins

How is menemen different from shakshuka?

The difference is in the eggs: in menemen they are stirred into the hot tomato and pepper sauce instead of being left whole to set, so the dish turns into one soft mass. For 2 servings, the onion, 2 peppers and 4–5 tomatoes stew under a lid for about 15 minutes, then 4 eggs are stirred in and cooked for 2–3 minutes, as runny or as firm as you like.

If you’ve been to Turkey – and I don’t mean an all-inclusive hotel holiday – you’ve surely seen or eaten Turkish eggs with vegetables, menemen. The dish can fairly be called one of the landmarks of Turkish cuisine: it was first made by Cretan Turks in Menemen, a district of Izmir that gave it its name. It’s just as good in a restaurant as it is from a street stall – and it’s made with plenty of imagination and endless variety.

The classic version uses onion, tomatoes and peppers. Other variations may add more vegetables, as well as mint, chili, bacon, local young cheeses and sausages.

By and large, Turkish menemen is similar to a Middle Eastern dish – Shakshuka. There, too, a vegetable sauce is made from tomatoes and peppers. The difference is that Shakshuka almost always comes with extra ingredients, and the eggs are cracked into the sauce whole and left to set. In Turkey the eggs are stirred into the sauce so that everything comes together as one. The eggs can still stay a little runny.

Ingredients

2 servings

Eggs 4
Tomatoes 4-5
Bell peppers 2
Onion 1
Butter 30 g
Olive oil 2 tbsp
Salt to taste
Dried herbs 1-2 pinches, optional
Sweet paprika flakes 0.5 tsp, optional
Bread, fresh herbs for serving

Step-by-step recipe

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Vegetable sauce

Good menemen starts with good ingredients. The vegetables should be fresh and ripe. Choose tomatoes with few seeds. Classic menemen uses green bell peppers, but any colour will do – and a mix of colours tastes better and looks prettier. The eggs must be absolutely fresh, since they may stay half-cooked in the dish. Don’t overdo the seasoning – salt is enough, plus a little dried herbs if you like, as long as they don’t drown out the vegetables.

Peel and finely chop the onion.

Heat the fat in a frying pan over medium heat.
The vegetables are usually fried in vegetable oil, most often olive oil. But for a special flavour, use a mix of equal parts butter and olive oil.
Fry the onion until it just starts to turn golden – literally 4-5 mins.
Wash the bell peppers and pat them dry with paper towels. Remove the seeds and stems. Cut the peppers into small cubes.
By the way, you can also use hot peppers in menemen if you like. Sometimes all the bell peppers are replaced with chilies of varying heat.
Add the chopped peppers to the fried onion, stir, and fry everything together for 5 mins.
Pour boiling water over the tomatoes and peel them – after the boiling water the skins come off much more easily. Large tomatoes can simply be peeled with a sharp knife. Dice the tomato flesh or, as many cooks recommend, grate it. Add the tomato pulp to the pan. Salt the vegetables to taste. If you like, add 1-2 pinches of dried herbs and 0.5 tsp of dried sweet pepper flakes. Fry the vegetables, stirring, until the tomatoes start releasing their juice.

Cover the pan with a lid and simmer the vegetables over medium heat for about 15 mins.
If the mixture is too runny, take the lid off so some of the liquid can evaporate. The tomatoes should turn soft but not watery. Keep in mind that once the eggs go in, menemen shouldn’t be swimming in liquid – it should be as thick as a dense purée.

Eggs

Crack the eggs into a bowl. Make sure no bits of shell got in. Lightly beat the eggs with a fork, just enough to combine them as for an omelet.
Turn the heat under the pan down to low. Pour the eggs into the vegetables while stirring, so they spread out and blend into the sauce. Cook, stirring, to the doneness you like – usually 2-3 mins is enough.
Eggs set quite quickly, so don’t overcook them. I prefer the whites fully set and the yolks almost done and still slightly runny – the yolks set more slowly.

Serving

The Turkish eggs are ready. Serve the dish garnished with fresh herb leaves, with bread on the side.
They’re usually served at the table in the same pan they were cooked in. In Turkey there’s special cookware for this – a small two-handled pan called a sahan, often made of copper. Many versions add local cheese, sucuk or pastirma shortly before the end of cooking – that’s a departure from the traditional recipe, but just as delicious.
You can make the dish with just the yolks – a special version also known as “Çakallı style”. It skips the onion, and it’s sprinkled with local cheese before serving and eaten with bread. Speaking of onion, whether to use it at all is a matter of debate – there have even been polls about it, with the votes split roughly down the middle. The spices vary too – cumin, mint, thyme and black pepper are all common.

Calories and macros

480 kcal

Serving ≈ 490 g

Protein17 g15% of kcal
Fat37 g71% of kcal
Carbs17 g15% of kcal

100 g97 kcalProtein 3.5 gFat 7.4 gCarbs 3.5 g

Calculated from the recipe ingredients, excluding salt and spices. Data: USDA and Matvaretabellen.

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