ABOUT THE BLOG
Exploring Pakistani food, one dish at a time.
Tarka Tales is an independent food writing blog about Pakistani cooking: how everyday dishes are made, why the techniques work, and the regional traditions and customs around them.
Why Tarka Tales exists
Pakistani food is often flattened online into a handful of restaurant dishes with the context stripped away. Tarka Tales sets out to explore it properly: what makes a karahi different from a salan, why biryani rice is boiled only part of the way, where Pakistan’s dates are grown, and how a weekend breakfast or an Eid kitchen actually works. Each piece tries to explain one thing well.
What you will find here
Recipes for home cooking, from daal chawal to nihari. Cooking guides on the techniques underneath them, such as browning onions, bhuna, dum and tarka. Food stories about traditions and places, published weekly and with their sources listed. Regional pages that introduce the food of each province, an ingredient glossary, and planning tools such as the biryani and rice calculators.
How the writing is done
Tarka Tales is a writing and research project, not a test kitchen. Recipes are written from research into how each dish is commonly made, and each one is checked so that every ingredient listed is used, quantities match the method and the times add up. Steps describe what to look for, such as colour, aroma, texture and the point where oil separates, because heat and pans vary more between kitchens than clocks do. The recipe methodology page explains this in full.
Stories about culture and history are checked against published sources, which are listed at the end of each piece. Where a custom varies between regions, cities or families, we say so rather than presenting one version as the rule.
Photographs
Photographs on the site are freely licensed images, mostly from Wikimedia Commons, used under Creative Commons licences. Each one is credited beneath the image and listed on the image credits page. They show the dish or subject in general, not a dish made from our recipe.
What we do not do
We do not publish star ratings, review counts or nutrition figures, because we do not run a reader review system and have not had these dishes laboratory measured. We do not give medical or health advice.
Who writes it
Tarka Tales is written and edited by Ayesha Iftikhar. It is independent and has no institutional or brand affiliations. Our editorial policy covers sourcing, images and advertising.
Get in touch
Corrections, questions, family variations of a dish and story ideas are all welcome. See the contact page, and the corrections policy for how errors are handled.