Menemen Recipe: Turkish Eggs with Tomatoes and Peppers

Step-by-step recipe

1. 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.
   
2. 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. Heat the fat in a frying pan, and meanwhile peel and finely chop the onion. Fry the onion until it just starts to turn golden – literally 4-5 mins.
   
3. Wash the bell peppers and pat them dry with paper towels. Remove the seeds and stems and 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.
   
4. It's worth peeling the tomatoes. Pour boiling water over them first and 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 until the tomatoes start releasing their juice.
   
5. 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.
   
6. 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 medium. Pour the eggs into the vegetables while stirring, so they spread out and blend into the sauce. Eggs set quite quickly, so cook them only to the doneness you like. I prefer the whites fully set and the yolks almost done and still slightly runny – the yolks set more slowly.
   
7. And so the Turkish eggs are ready. 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. Serve the dish garnished with fresh herb leaves, with bread on the side.
   
8. 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.