How Pakistani food is really cooked
Most Pakistani cooking starts the same way: oil or ghee in a heavy pan, onions taken to the right shade of brown, then ginger, garlic, tomatoes and dry spices cooked down until the oil runs clear at the edges. That last stage has a name, , and it decides whether a dish tastes deep and rounded or flat and raw. If you learn one technique from this site, make it that one.
From there the food splits by region and by occasion. Punjab cooks with ghee, wheat and plenty of green chilies, and eats roti with almost everything. Karachi and Sindh lean on rice, tamarind and sharper heat. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa keeps things simple: meat, salt, tomatoes, black pepper, and a hot fire. Weddings and Eid bring out the slow dishes like nihari, haleem and qorma that take a morning or a whole night.
Finding your way around
The recipes are grouped the way a Pakistani kitchen thinks about a meal. Salan (the meat or vegetable curry) is the centre, eaten with roti or rice. A daal often sits beside it, with raita, chutney or a plain onion-tomato salad on the side. Weekend breakfasts, Ramadan iftar snacks and street food each have their own section, and so do sweets.
If you are new to desi cooking, good first recipes are masoor daal, chicken karahi and aloo gobi. They use common ingredients, teach the basic techniques and forgive small mistakes. When you are ready for a project, try chicken biryani or nihari.
What every recipe here includes
Each recipe has exact quantities that scale with the number of people, a drawing for every ingredient, and illustrated steps that show what the pot should look like as you go: heat level, lid on or off, when the oil separates. Kitchen words like dum, tarka or kanni have a small info button that explains them, and the full list lives in the glossary. Every recipe is also available in Urdu.