The Creamy Key Ingredient That Makes Turkish Pasta So Delicious

The most iconic Turkish recipes may not include pasta, but Turkish pasta is a viral TikTok pasta worth making. And the one creamy key ingredient that makes Turkish pasta so delicious is Greek yogurt. A tangy yet creamy ingredient — also used in famous Turkish meze dips like Haydari and Havuç tarator — yogurt is the base of the pasta sauce used in the viral TikTok video and recipe shared by Anna Paul.

The video shows how Turkish pasta is essentially a deconstructed dish in which toppings, sauce, and pasta are made separately and then layered onto each individual plate. To make the sauce, Paul's mother simply adds crushed garlic and salt to a carton of Greek yogurt, like full-fat Chobani, and calls it a day. The dairy richness, tang, and creaminess of the yogurt coupled with the spicy, savory bite of the crushed garlic make the perfect complement for an umami-rich, heavily spiced ground meat topping.

The yogurt sauce is dolled out in hefty spoonfuls over a plate of pasta already covered in ground meat. The yogurt and meat meld into a meat sauce that you might liken to an elevated Mediterranean take on Hamburger Helper. Despite its heavy, comforting appeal, the yogurt sauce cuts through the richness of the meat, brightening the palate and enhancing the aromatic and spicy seasonings in the meat and garnishes.

Turkish pasta became a viral hit for both convenience and flavor. The "sauce" is essentially spiking a carton of yogurt with garlic and salt, the meat topping is a blend of ground meat and spices in a frying pan, and the assembly is a buffet-style layering of each individual component. Anna Paul translates tips and tricks uttered by her mother as she throws the dish together. A three-ingredient yogurt sauce is made even easier with a garlic press like this one. 

Both the seasonings used in the ground beef and the yogurt sauce are classic Turkish flavors that, blended with pasta, are supposed to be a riff on Manti, meat stuffed dumplings popular in Turkey and Armenia. We have a recipe for Armenian Sini Manti you can compare the viral pasta to. Instead of enveloping the ingredients in a dumpling, bowtie pasta is the type of pasta used in the recipe, its many crevices effectively trapping all the chunky meat and creamy yogurt. While the final touch is a sweet paprika butter sauce, you can add even more vibrance to the yogurt sauce itself transforming it into a creamy version of Turkish Acili Ezme. You can also take the yogurt sauce into a more refreshing direction by transforming it into a tzatziki sauce, adding freshly diced parsley, dill, red onion, lemon juice, and cucumbers. You can still use the yogurt carton to do all of your mixing, saving yourself the trouble of dirtying a mixing bowl.