Turkish Borani Recipe (Spinach With Yoghurt) • Turkey’s For Life

Spinach and yoghurt – two common ingredients in Turkish cuisine and a dream combination in this delicious spinach borani recipe.

Whilst it’s not particularly a seasonal food on the local markets – you can buy fresh spinach year round – we love spring and early summer when the spinach is young and slightly more delicate.

During the colder winter months, the spinach is more robust.

It still makes a great borani. But a more rigorous washing of the leaves is necessary beforehand (they can often be muddy) and you need a slightly longer cooking time.

You also get a stronger flavour.

The younger spinach of the warmer months gives us longer, elegant stems that make life much easier when it comes to bunching them and cutting off the leaves.

And, of course, no waste.

We can make another side dish of Turkish spinach stem salad with the stems.

What Is Borani?

Good question!

It depends where you are, it seems.

Borani esfanaj is a traditional dish in Persian cuisine which is a creamy spinach and yoghurt dip.

This Persian spinach dip is not dissimilar to havuç tarator – the Turkish carrot and garlic yoghurt dip.

Once we hit the southeastern Turkish provinces, however, things change. Then we have the addition of ground meat and black-eyed peas with lots of juices.

We move away from it being a salad recipe to more of a stew.

Armenia, Albania and parts of Greece also have borani as part of their cuisine. In fact, the borani of Albania is spinach and eggs.

But the one constant seems to be the sauteed or braised spinach – or other similar greens like chard and nettles.

Lokanta-Style Spinach Borani

The Turkish spinach borani recipe we’re going to be doing in this recipe is our take on the lokanta-style spinach borani.

Whenever we go to a lokanta in Fethiye, we always look to see if there’s spinach borani in the bain marie.

More often than not, there is.

And it goes so well as a side dish with bulgur pilaf and tomato and whatever meat dishes we order.

How We Make Spinach Borani

First of all (if it’s spring or early summer) we buy half a kilo of fresh baby spinach from Çalış Sunday market and give it a really good wash.

Regular spinach is fine if you can’t get young spinach.

Lots Of Leaves

The leaves are chopped off and the stems put in the fridge.

And then it’s really simple.

In a large frying pan, we heat a generous glug of olive oil over a medium heat and saute sliced white onions.

When these start to sweat we go in with our spinach.

Wilting Spinach

It might look like a lot at first. But the spinach shrinks very quickly.

If it doesn’t all fit in at once, don’t worry. It will soon start to wilt. And you can then add the rest.

When your spinach has wilted, add some salt, freshly ground black pepper. And then we also add a good heaped teaspoon of paprika.

Then we stir the spinach and onion mixture, add around half a cup of water and leave it to simmer on a low heat for around 5 minutes until the spinach becomes a lovely dark green in colour.

Excess Water

We don’t like a completely dry texture for our spinach borani.

A bit of juice needs to be in there, for us, so we’re not too concerned about excess water.

Sometimes, we even add a little bit more if it has completely evaporated because the spinach dish in lokantas is never completely dry.

Once we’re happy with the texture, we pour it into our serving bowl.

Our Borani Topping

And then, while our spinach mixture is cooling, we move on to the rest of the borani.

We like to add walnuts to lots of our salads and sides. Our spinach borani is no different.

It’s a little added luxury that you don’t get in a lokanta. But it looks and tastes the part if you’re having a dinner party – or just enjoying it to yourself, of course.

As for the yoghurt, we want a good quality, thick and creamy yoghurt.

Obviously, we use Turkish süzme yoghurt (strained yoghurt) but if you can’t get that, plain Greek yoghurt will work just as well.

We mix one clove of crushed fresh garlic into our yoghurt.

And, once the spinach borani mixture is at room temperature, spoon the garlic yoghurt over the top, along the centre.

When we’re ready to serve our spinach borani, we mix hot paprika or chilli flakes (hot red pepper flakes) and heat this for a few seconds on a medium-high heat before drizzling over the yoghurt and sprinkling the walnuts over the top.

And that’s it.

Serve your spinach borani as a side dish – it goes really well with lots of other Turkish recipes.

Most recently, we had it with chicken shish but it also goes really well with seafood dishes, Turkish rice and, as you can see in the lokanta photo above, stews and casseroles.

Or if you want a light vegetarian dish, we can vouch for the fact that this spinach borani tastes great the day after, served on a piece of lightly toasted crusty bread.

Our Turkish Spinach Borani Recipe

Let’s get cooking!