Turkish kitchen is full of yummy variations on minced meat with veggies (one I already described in this blog, the Manisa kebabı). İzmir köfte, meatballs İzmir style, is another of my favourites. They are essentially baked meatballs with potatoes and red sauce.

I made them several times with slight variations on the recipe below and it is one of my favourite dishes to make when guests are coming – not too complicated, the meatball mixture can be prepared a day in advance, and the last part is done in oven, giving you time to clean up or whatever you want to before your guests are arriving. Enough talking, let’s get cooking!

Suitable for: This is halal, but not vegetarian. It contains no nuts, shellfish, soy, but it contains eggs and is not glutene-free. If using tarhana as in my recipe below it is also not lactose-free nor kosher.

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⌚ Ca. 20 min preparation, at least 90 min resting time, ca. 75 min cooking and baking time

Ingredients (for 4 servings) 🛒

Meatballs: 600 g finely ground medium-fat beef, 1 cup Turkish tarhana*, 1/2 cup breadcrumbs, 2 small to medium onions (grated), 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp pepper, 1 tsp thyme or oregano, 2-3 tbsp finely chopped parsley,

Additionally: 4-5 medium sized potatoes, 1/2 cup tomato puree, 2 tbsp pepper paste**, 1 tsp thyme or oregano, 1 cup of water, a few spoonfuls of sunflower oil, 1 tomato, 1 sweet pepper, 1 hot pepper

* If you don’t have or don’t want to use Turkish tarhana (fermented flour with yoghurt and spices, usually used for soups, but I love to use it as a replacement for breadcrumbs), replace with equal amount of breadcrumbs with 2 tsp ground paprika, 1/2 tsp salt and 1/2 tsp thyme or oregano. In fact, original recipes use breadcrumbs and not tarhana.

** If you don’t have pepper paste, replace with tomato paste and a little bit of ground paprika (this is even closer to the original recipes).

How to 🍳

First, prepare the köfte: Place all the meatball ingredients in a bowl, knead well, cover, leave to rest for at least one hour in the fridge. Take them out of the fridge at least half an hour before cooking.

Peel and halve the potatoes, cut into slices about 4-5 mm wide. Clean the tomato and peppers, cut into pieces. Form lengish meatballs.

Heat one pan and one small pot. Preheat the oven to 180 C.

In the pan, add some oil, fry the potatoes for about 5 minutes, then leave to drain on a paper towel. In the same pan shortly fry the meatballs, just enough to ‘seal’ from all sides.

In the pot, heat pepper paste, tomato purree and water, add the thyme.

Oil an oven proof dish, arrange the meatballs and potatoes. Pour the red sauce over them, on top you arrange the tomato and pepper pieces.

Bake for about 45 minutes and serve with plain rice, or with bread.