Aloo Gosht
The most-cooked dish in Pakistan and one of the worst documented. The whole recipe is twenty minutes of patience most people don't give it.
Pakistani home cooking, documented
The recipes nobody wrote down
Your mother cooks by andaza — by estimation. She cannot tell you the weight of anything. This is an archive that turns that into numbers, so the cooking survives the distance.
Where we're starting
The archive opens with the food that gets cooked on an ordinary Tuesday, because that is the food most likely to be lost — nobody photographs it, nobody writes it down, and it disappears one household at a time.
Koki
The onion-and-chilli flatbread eaten across Sindh every morning, and almost invisible in English.
Chapshuro
A stuffed meat bread from the far north, cooked in households that sit closer to Central Asia than to Lahore.
How this archive works
Everything is weighed
Every solid ingredient has a gram weight. There is no “salt to taste” anywhere on this site — you get a number, and then you get told how to adjust it. That single rule is the reason the archive exists.
Everything is cooked twice
Once to learn it, once to check that the written version actually works. If a recipe is here, it has been made from these words, in a normal kitchen, and it came out right.
Failure is documented
Every entry tells you what going wrong looks like and why — split yogurt, disintegrated potatoes, a masala that never released its oil. Knowing the failure is most of knowing the dish.
Every dish names its household
Recipes come from somewhere and from someone. Each entry records the community, the city, and — with permission — the kitchen it was learned in. That is what makes this an archive rather than a collection.
The archive is being built in the open. New entries are published as they are cooked, tested and photographed — several a week, starting with everyday Punjabi and Sindhi food and moving outward to Memon, Bohri, Pashtun, Balochi, Kashmiri and Gilgit-Baltistan households.