Mercimek Çorbası: Turkish Red Lentil Soup with Chili Butter

Mercimek çorbası is Turkey’s everyday red lentil soup: split red lentils, onion and carrot simmered until they fall apart, then blended smooth. Each bowl gets a spoon of butter heated with red pepper flakes, a pinch of dried mint and a squeeze of lemon at the table. It takes about 50 minutes for 6 bowls.

What mercimek çorbası is

The soup on every Turkish table

Mercimek means lentil and çorba means soup. In Turkey it is the soup you meet first: at home, in the canteen and in the esnaf lokantası, the tradesmen’s restaurant with its trays of ready food. GoTürkiye, the government’s tourism site, calls it “one of the most favored traditional soups in Türkiye” in a guide to Turkish starters.

Turks usually eat soup before the main course, but not only then. The cookbook writer Ozlem Warren calls it probably Turkey’s most popular soup. In a 2010 recipe, she notes that people enjoy it at lunch and dinner “but also for a hearty breakfast in Anatolia”.

Smooth, golden and thin enough to pour

A good bowl is velvety and an even golden orange, with no whole lentils left. Split red lentils lose their salmon color as they cook and turn yellow, and the carrot pushes it toward orange.

Istanbul cooks often use lentils alone. “The version found most commonly in İstanbul is made purely with lentils,” Warren writes in her recipe on Ozlem’s Turkish Table. Like her mother, she adds carrot and potato. So does this recipe, and both are optional.

Not the same soup as ezogelin

Ezogelin is a separate soup, and Turkey registers it on its own. Turkey’s patent office listed “Ezo Gelin Çorbası” as a traditional product name for Oğuzeli, near Gaziantep, in September 2020. Its file describes lentils cooked with bulgur and rice and seasoned with pepper paste. Cooks leave ezogelin textured, with dried mint, while they blend mercimek smooth.

The file also tells the story of Ezo, a bride from Oğuzeli in the early 1900s who first made the soup. It is a much-loved tale, but no record backs it.

Where red lentil soup comes from

Lentils and Anatolia

Lentils are among the oldest crops of the region. At Gusir Höyük, a Neolithic village in the Upper Tigris valley of southeast Anatolia, the archaeobotanist Ceren Kabukcu analyzed ancient lentil seeds. Seeds dated to about 10,500 years ago point to “the potential onset of lentil cultivation”, her 2023 paper concludes. That is a careful “potential”, not proof that farmers first grew lentils there.

Missing from the first cookbooks

Lentil soup was cheap, daily food, and the early cookbooks skipped it. The first printed Turkish cookbook, Melceü’t-Tabbâhîn of 1844, opens with six soups: chickpea, two fish soups, tarhana, liver and a sour soup. None uses lentils.

Twenty years later, Türabi Efendi published a Turkish Cookery Book in London. He lists eleven soups, from vermicelli to tripe, but again no lentil soup. Lentil soup turns up in print in a household cookbook, Ev Kadını, in 1883, a 2021 study of Ottoman egg dishes notes. That version used egg.

The red lentil belt

Today almost all of Turkey’s red lentils grow in the southeast. Şanlıurfa grows 43.7% of them and Diyarbakır 27.2%, a July 2025 market report from the agriculture ministry’s research institute shows.

One lentil has its own protected name: “Kızıltepe Kırmızı Mercimeği”, from the plain around Kızıltepe in Mardin province. Turkey’s patent office registered it as a designation of origin in September 2022. Its file describes small, bright red lentils that are ready in roughly 20 minutes.

Why red lentil soup fits this winter

A harvest back from a bad year

The year 2025 was a hard one for Turkish lentils. Frost and drought cut Turkey’s red lentil harvest by 38.3%, to about 250,000 metric tons, the statistics office TÜİK reported in December. Bloomberg HT covered those final figures.

The 2026 crop came back strongly. In May, TÜİK’s first estimate put it at 385,000 tons, up 54.1%, Bloomberg HT reported. The second estimate followed on October 23 and trimmed it to 368,600 tons, Sabah reported. By our arithmetic, that is still about half as much again as in 2025. Final figures are due in December.

Lentils got cheaper

The new crop pulled prices down. In June, Mehmet Reis spoke for the rice and pulse company Reis Gıda, which he chairs. Bulk hulled red lentils in the southeast had fallen from over 90 lira a kilo to under 70, he said. He told Ekonomi Gazetesi that the new harvest brought “a sharp fall” (our translation). That is a company’s view, not an official price.

In September, the labor confederation Türk-İş found that some supermarkets had kept the red lentil price cuts they made in August. Its monthly survey tracks the cost of a family’s food basket.

Fewer lentils from Canada

Canada is the other big source of red lentils. Canadian farmers planted 10.9% fewer acres of lentils in 2026, Statistics Canada reported in June. Its September model estimate put production down 26.7%. Stocks were large, though: up 128.9% at the end of July.

Ramadan comes early in 2027

Mercimek is the classic opener of the iftar, the meal that breaks the daily Ramadan fast. In January 2026, the recipe site Yemek.com put it first on its list of traditional iftar dishes, calling it one of the most traditional starters. In 2027 the first day of fasting is Monday, February 8, according to the religious affairs directorate’s calendar, Evrensel reported.

No number for the soup itself

Nobody we could find has published a 2026 sales figure, survey or search count for mercimek çorbası. The news this year is the lentil harvest and its price. The soup is simply what Turkish cooks make with them.

What 31 mercimek recipes agree on

We compared 31 published recipes for this soup. Sixteen are in Turkish, from Yemek.com, Lezzet, Nefis Yemek Tarifleri, the TV chef Arda Türkmen, Refika Birgül, Ye-mek.net and four national newspapers. The rest include Ozlem Warren, NYT Cooking, Milk Street, The Mediterranean Dish and two recipes from Turkey’s culture and tourism ministry.

Onion, lentils and a blender

All 30 with a full ingredient list use onion. Every Turkish recipe blends or sieves the soup smooth, and 24 of the 31 recipes overall do. The median is 148 g of lentils per liter of liquid. For 6 bowls, that works out to about 250 g of lentils and 1.4 liters of water or stock. The median total time is 40 minutes.

Flour in Turkey, cumin abroad

This is the biggest split. Fourteen of the 16 Turkish recipes stir a spoon of flour into the fat, which gives the soup body. Yemek.com says flour makes it thicker, and you can leave it out if you like a thinner soup. Most English-language recipes use none.

Cumin goes the other way. Eleven of the 15 English-language recipes add it to the pot, but only 4 of the 16 Turkish ones do.

Paste is optional

Tomato paste is in 8 of the 15 English-language recipes but only 4 of the Turkish ones. Turkish pepper paste, biber salçası, shows up in just one, as an option. Yemek.com allows tomato or pepper paste, so it is a choice, not a rule.

Carrot and potato

Carrot is in 17 of 30 recipes and potato in 15. The restaurant style, lokanta usulü, often uses only onion, lentils and flour. Sabah’s restaurant-style version points out that it uses no meat or chicken stock at all.

Red butter on top

Eighteen recipes finish the bowl with a red fat: butter or oil heated with pepper flakes or paprika. In Turkish recipes that fat is butter in 8 of 9. Seventeen serve lemon, and 10 add mint.

How to make it smooth and golden

• Wash the lentils well. Refika Birgül rinses until the water runs clear. In her recipe, she warns that cloudy water makes the soup a little bitter and greys its color.
• Skim the foam. Lezzet tells you to lift off the foam that forms as the lentils come to a boil.
• Toast the flour, but not too far. Refika says the darker a butter and flour roux gets, the less it thickens and the more flavor it gives.
• Blend off the heat. A stick blender in the pot is easiest and safest.
• Thin it with hot water. The soup should pour from the ladle. It keeps thickening as it stands.
• Add the lemon at the table. Arda Türkmen’s recipe ends with the advice to serve it hot with a lemon wedge.

Ways to vary mercimek çorbası

• Süzme: push the blended soup through a sieve for the silkiest restaurant texture.
• Lokanta usulü: onion, lentils, flour and water only, with plenty of lemon.
• Vegan and gluten free: skip the flour, cook in olive oil and make the chili drizzle with oil.
• With rice: a spoon of rice simmered with the lentils thickens the soup without flour, as Warren does.
• Yellow lentils: some Turkish recipes use sarı mercimek, which gives a paler soup.
• Tomato version: a spoon of tomato paste turns it coral and a little sharper.

Serving mercimek çorbası

Serve it very hot, with lemon wedges and bread. Turks often add croutons or toasted bread. Refika’s table also holds crisp pide, olives and strained yogurt, so everyone can add what they like.

As a starter, it suits Gaziantep’s lamb soup beyran on another day. For dessert, try kabak tatlısı, pumpkin candied in syrup. Lebanon’s mujadara is another good way to cook lentils.

Storing, safety and nutrition

Cooling and keeping the soup

A big pot of thick soup holds its heat for a long time, so cool it fast. Divide it into shallow containers and get it cold no later than 2 hours after cooking. The USDA’s leftovers guidance gives 3 to 4 days in the fridge.

The UK’s Food Standards Agency is stricter. Its student guide to food safety says to eat fridge leftovers within 48 hours and reheat them only once. The soup freezes well for 2 to 3 months. Freeze it in portions, without the chili butter.

Reheating

The soup sets thick in the fridge. Warm it with a splash of hot water, stirring, until it bubbles hard across the whole surface, as the USDA advises for soups. Every spoonful should be steaming. Make the chili butter fresh.

Hot soup in a blender

Hot liquid in a sealed jug can force the lid off. Breville, the appliance maker, warns in its blender tips that a hot mixture “can create steam or pressure”. It recommends an immersion blender for large amounts of hot liquid. Vitamix’s manual says never to fill the jug to the top and always to start on the lowest speed.

Lentils need cooking, not soaking

Red lentils need no soaking. Split red lentils cook in about 5 to 7 minutes on their own, according to the Saskatchewan growers’ site lentils.org. Raw lentils do contain lectins, but boiling or stewing “can inactivate most lectins”, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health explains. A 25-minute simmer leaves the lentils soft and safe.

Allergens

As written, the soup contains milk, from the butter, and wheat, from the flour. Stock cubes can add celery or other allergens, so read the label. Without the flour and with oil instead of butter, the soup is vegan and gluten free.

Nutrition

One bowl made with water has about 260 calories, 11 g of protein, 35 g of carbohydrate and 6 g of fiber. It has 9 g of fat, about half of it from the chili butter. These are our estimates from USDA FoodData Central data on red lentils, onion, carrot, potato, butter, oil and flour.

With 1 teaspoon of salt, a bowl has about 400 mg of sodium. Stock or bouillon adds more, so taste before you salt.

Fixes for thick, grainy, pale or flat soup

• It is too thick: loosen it with hot water, a little at a time. Lentil soup always thickens as it cools.
• It is grainy: the lentils were not cooked long enough. Simmer 10 minutes more and blend again.
• It is grey or brown: the lentils were not washed well, or the onion browned. Wash them until the water is clear.
• It tastes flat: add salt and plenty of lemon. A little more chili butter helps too.
• It tastes floury: the flour needed a minute longer in the fat before the water went in.
• The butter turned black: the pepper flakes burned. Lift the pan from the burner before the flakes go in.

Substitutes for missing ingredients

• Pul biber: sweet paprika with a pinch of chili flakes or cayenne.
• Split red lentils: split yellow lentils. Whole brown or green lentils make a different, chunkier soup.
• Butter: olive oil, in the pot and for the drizzle.
• Flour: a tablespoon of rice simmered with the lentils, or nothing at all.
• Pepper paste: tomato paste, or leave it out.
• Dried mint: a little fresh mint, finely chopped.

Frequently asked questions

How is mercimek çorbası different from ezogelin?

Mercimek çorbası is red lentils blended smooth. Ezogelin adds bulgur, rice and pepper paste, and stays textured.

Do I need to soak red lentils?

No. Split red lentils cook quickly without soaking. Rinse them well to remove dust and starch.

Why is my lentil soup not orange?

Unwashed lentils and browned onion dull the color. Carrot and a spoon of paste make it more orange.

Is mercimek çorbası vegan?

Not as written: it has butter. Use olive oil in the pot and for the drizzle, and skip the flour for a gluten-free soup too.

Can I freeze Turkish lentil soup?

Yes, for 2 to 3 months. Freeze it in portions and add the chili butter when you reheat it.

What goes with mercimek çorbası?

Lemon wedges, bread or croutons, and dried mint. In Turkey it usually comes before a main dish.