Tarhana substitutes

The same food under a Greek name: cracked wheat or flour fermented with soured milk and dried. Sour trahana behaves like tarhana in the pot, thickening and turning tangy as it simmers.

Best for

tarhana soup, thick winter soups, cooking with tomato and butter

Make sure you buy the sour type (ksino), not the sweet milk trahana, which is made with fresh milk and tastes like a mild semolina porridge with no tang at all. Trahana usually has no tomato or pepper in it, so add a tablespoon of tomato paste per two cups of soup to get Turkish colour and flavour. The grains are often coarser, so expect a slightly nubbier soup.

The most accurate thing you can do with ordinary ingredients, and it gets you a genuinely good soup. Melt a tablespoon of butter, cook a finely chopped onion until soft, stir in the flour and toast it for two minutes, add the paste and cook another minute, then whisk in stock and simmer 15 minutes.

Best for

tarhana corbasi, weeknight soup, when you cannot source tarhana at all

Take the pan off the boil before you whisk in the yogurt, and temper it first with a ladle of hot soup, or the yogurt will split into grainy curds. Add a good squeeze of lemon at the end, which stands in for some of the fermented sourness. What you cannot fake is the deep, slightly cheesy fermented aroma, so the soup tastes fresher and simpler than the real thing.

The Levantine and Persian equivalents of the sour dairy half of tarhana: yogurt or whey fermented with grain and dried hard. Kishk in particular is a dried bulgur and yogurt powder that dissolves into a tangy, savoury soup.

Best for

sour soups, thickening with tang, stirring into broths

This nails the fermented sour dairy note that no fresh yogurt can reproduce, which is the hardest part of tarhana to imitate. What it lacks is the tomato, pepper and onion base, so stir in a tablespoon of tomato or Turkish pepper paste per two cups of soup. Kashk sold as a thick liquid is very salty, so hold back the salt until the end.

A clever route if you keep a starter, because sourdough discard brings both the flour and the live fermented sourness in one ingredient.

Best for

tarhana-style soup, sour thick soups, using up starter

Whisk the discard into the soup base with the stock and simmer at least 15 minutes so the raw flour cooks out, otherwise the soup tastes pasty. The sourness is sharper and more lactic-acidic than tarhana, which is rounder and more savoury, and there is no vegetable flavour, so tomato paste and dried mint are still needed. Use a mature, tangy discard rather than a freshly fed one.

Gets the texture closer than plain flour does, because fine semolina swells into the same slightly grainy, spoon-coating body that crumbled tarhana gives.

Best for

texture-focused substitution, quick soups, thickening a thin broth

Toast the semolina in butter until it smells nutty before adding liquid, or it tastes raw and chalky. Flavour-wise this is the plainest option on the list, so it needs help: tomato paste, plenty of dried mint, red pepper flakes bloomed in butter and a firm hit of lemon. Nobody would mistake it for tarhana, but it makes a comforting soup in twenty minutes.

The honest least-bad supermarket answer when you have a Turkish recipe, no Turkish shop nearby and no time.

Best for

absolute emergencies, a warm tomato-and-yogurt soup

Make the tomato soup according to its packet, then take it off the heat and whisk in tempered yogurt, a squeeze of lemon, a big pinch of dried mint and Turkish pepper flakes bloomed in butter. You will get something warm, red, sour and pleasant, but the base is sweet and salty in a way tarhana never is, and the fermented character is entirely absent. Treat it as a different soup that scratches the same itch.