Turkey has at least three great egg dishes and Australians order the wrong one constantly. Here is what separates menemen, cilbir and sucuklu yumurta, and where to eat all three in Sydney.
Somewhere in the last few years "Turkish eggs" became a fixture on Australian brunch menus, usually meaning poached eggs dropped onto yoghurt with a swirl of chilli butter and a price tag around twenty six dollars. It is a good dish. It is also one of three, and the other two almost never make it onto those menus.
If you have been searching Turkish eggs near me and getting the same yoghurt plate everywhere, here is the wider picture: what each dish actually is, how they differ, and how to know when one has been made properly.
Cilbir: The One Everyone Means
Cilbir is the dish the phrase "Turkish eggs" almost always refers to. Thick yoghurt is whisked with crushed garlic and salt and spread across a shallow bowl. Two eggs are poached soft and set on top. Then butter is melted with dried Aleppo pepper until it turns a deep rust colour and is spooned over the whole thing so it pools into the yoghurt.
It is genuinely ancient. Versions of it appear in Ottoman palace kitchen records from the 15th century, which makes it older than most of the European breakfast canon by several hundred years. It survived because it is a very efficient piece of cooking: three ingredients, no technique that cannot be learned in a morning, and a result that tastes far more complicated than it is.
How to tell if it is done right
- The yoghurt is warm or at room temperature, never fridge cold. This is the single most common failure.
- The garlic is raw and grated fine, so it is sharp rather than sweet.
- The butter is properly bloomed with chilli until the colour changes. Pale butter with chilli flakes floating on top has not been made, it has been assembled.
- The yolk is liquid. Cilbir with a hard yolk has lost its sauce.
- Bread arrives with it, not as an upsell. The dish is not finished without something to drag through the yoghurt.
Menemen: Eggs Cooked Into the Vegetables
Menemen is the opposite approach. Rather than sitting eggs on top of something, it cooks them into a base of ripe tomato and long green pepper softened slowly in olive oil, stirring until the eggs are just set and the whole pan is soft and a little saucy. It arrives still bubbling in the pan it was cooked in.
It gets confused with shakshuka constantly. The difference is the egg: shakshuka poaches whole eggs in the sauce and leans on cumin and paprika, while menemen stirs them through and keeps the seasoning quiet so the tomato leads. If you want the full argument, including the onion question that Turkish families have not resolved in a century, we wrote about menemen separately.
Sucuklu Yumurta: The One Australians Would Love
Sucuklu yumurta is eggs fried with sucuk, the dry-cured Turkish beef sausage seasoned heavily with garlic, cumin and sumac. The sucuk is sliced and rendered first so it releases its spiced red fat, then the eggs go straight into that fat and cook in it.
It is the closest thing Turkey has to a bacon and egg breakfast, and it is better, because sucuk carries more spice than bacon and the fat it renders seasons the eggs as they cook. It is baffling that it has not spread across Sydney brunch menus the way cilbir has. Order it once and you will understand why it is the Turkish weekend standard.
Which One Should You Order?
- Want the internet dish, light and tangy: cilbir. Best with strong Turkish coffee to cut the yoghurt.
- Want something soft, warm and vegetarian: menemen. Best shared straight from the pan with a lot of bread.
- Want a real breakfast that will hold you until dinner: sucuklu yumurta.
- Cannot decide: the Turkish Breakfast Board lets you pick one of the three as the hot dish and surrounds it with cheese, olives, jam, honey, bread and tea.
Where to Eat Turkish Eggs in Sydney
We serve all three at Cappadocia Cafe on Stanley Street in Darlinghurst. Cilbir is $20, on labneh with cooked spinach and seasoned burnt butter. Menemen is $20, cooked down slowly and finished with melted mozzarella and toasted Turkish bread. Sucuk and eggs is available on its own or as the hot dish inside the $32 Turkish Breakfast Board.
We open at 6am on weekdays and 7am on weekends, which for most of the eastern city makes us the earliest place doing any of this properly. We are five minutes from Kings Cross station and a ten minute walk from the CBD through Hyde Park.
All three are on the breakfast menu at 82-84 Stanley St, Darlinghurst. From 6am weekdays, 7am weekends.
Or order online for delivery:
