Çılbır (Poached Eggs on Garlic Yoghurt)

Variations

• Fried instead of poached: the Balkan relative čimbur is a fried egg under the same name, which ko.wikipedia records as a separate branch.
• Olive oil instead of butter: lighter, and less aromatic. Half of what this dish smells of is butter solids browning with the chilli.
• Dried mint: nearly always there in Turkish homes, and fresh mint does not substitute — dried mint gives up its aroma to hot fat, fresh mint just goes black in it.
• Scaling up: six eggs on one large plate makes it brunch rather than a starter.
• Beside menemen: two Turkish egg dishes aimed opposite ways. Menemen cooks the eggs in the sauce; çılbır cooks them apart and sets them on it.

Tips

• Why boiling butter on yoghurt does not split it. Dairy and heat says heating a yoghurt makes its proteins clump and separate. Here butter well past 100°C goes straight onto it and nothing happens, because three things coincide: butter is fat with almost no water, so it cannot carry heat into the protein; it is less dense, so it floats instead of mixing; and the contact lasts seconds. Stir that same butter into the yoghurt and it splits on the spot. Pouring and mixing are different operations.
• Room-temperature yoghurt is a temperature decision, not a flavour one. The eggs are hot and the butter is hot; a fridge-cold base makes the whole plate lukewarm. Straight out of serving temperature, and half an hour is enough.
• Eggs Benedict already explains the poaching. Sieving the loose white away, vinegar rather than salt, draining the egg before it lands — follow that page. There is only one thing to add: its sauce sets as it cools, so it says to warm the plates, and this one must not be warmed at all. The same poached egg over two sauces with opposite requirements.
• Grate the garlic and leave it raw. Same as tzatziki, and the same warning applies: it gets sharper as it sits, so do not make it far ahead.
• The chilli goes in off the heat. Once the butter stops foaming, take the pan off and stir it in (blooming spices) — you want the colour and aroma without scorching. Fine chilli flakes turn bitter in about thirty seconds.
• Use a thick yoghurt. A loose one spreads thin on the plate, and it carries enough whey that the butter really will split it. Failing that, hang it in a cloth for two hours.