Cacık.

Name: Cacık (Chilled Turkish Cucumber Yogurt with Mint)
Prep time: 10 min
Total time: 40 min
Yield: 4 servings
Cuisine: Turkey
Ingredients: 500 g full-fat plain yogurt, well chilled; 2 medium cucumbers, coarsely grated; 2 cloves garlic, crushed to a paste with salt; 2 tsp dried mint; 150 ml ice-cold water; 2 tbsp good olive oil, for drizzling; 1 tsp fine salt, plus more for the cucumber; to taste pul biber or sumac, to finish

Chilled Turkish Cucumber Yogurt with Mint

Cacık · say it: jah-JUHK

Cacık is yogurt loosened with cold water until it pours from a spoon, mixed with grated or diced cucumber, a little raw garlic, dried mint and olive oil, and served properly cold. It is not a dip. In Turkey it arrives in a shallow bowl with a spoon in it, and people eat it alongside grilled meat, pilav or stuffed vegetables in the way you would eat a soup — in summer it is sometimes served with ice cubes floating in it. The flavor is sour, saline and sharply cool, with dried mint giving a dusty herbal note that fresh mint cannot replicate. It takes ten minutes and it exists to make everything on the plate next to it taste better.

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Chilled Turkish Cucumber Yogurt with Mint

Gate: TurkeyNationwide
Prep: 10 min
Cook: 0 min
Total time: 40 min incl. 30 min rest
Serves: 4
Status: Easy
Nutrition / serving · estimated: Calories 150 kcal; Protein 8 g; Carbs 10 g; Fat 9 g; Fiber 1 g; Sugar 9 g; Sodium 620 mg

Why this recipe works.

Salted and squeezed cucumber, so the bowl stays sour and seasoned instead of turning watery within an hour.
Thinned with cold water to the loose, spoonable consistency Turkish cooks actually serve.
Dried mint rubbed between the palms to wake up its oils — the one detail that makes it taste Turkish.
Ten minutes of work, and it improves while it sits in the fridge.

Ingredients.

8 items

Servings

500 g full-fat plain yogurt, well chilled
2 medium cucumbers, coarsely grated
2 cloves garlic, crushed to a paste with saltone clove for a mild bowl, three if your household likes it fierce
2 tsp dried mint
150 ml ice-cold wateradd gradually to reach a pourable consistency
2 tbsp good olive oil, for drizzling
1 tsp fine salt, plus more for the cucumber
to taste pul biber or sumac, to finish (optional)

Equipment

Box grater
Mixing bowl
Clean cloth or fine sieve for squeezing

Instructions.

Draw the water out of the cucumber
Coarsely grate 2 of cucumbers into a bowl, toss with a good pinch of salt and leave for 10 minutes. Gather the shreds in your hands or a clean cloth and squeeze hard — a surprising amount of green liquid will come out, and the cucumber should end up compact and almost dry.
Tip Squeeze harder than feels polite. This one step decides whether the bowl holds together.
Make the garlic paste
Crush the garlic with a pinch of salt using a mortar or the flat of a knife, working until it turns into a smooth, wet paste with no visible pieces. Chopped garlic gives uneven raw bursts; the paste dissolves evenly through the yogurt.
Loosen the yogurt
Beat the yogurt smooth in a wide bowl, then whisk in the cold water a splash at a time until it falls from a spoon in a slow ribbon. Stop while it still coats the back of the spoon — you can always thin it further at the table.
Bring it together
Stir the squeezed cucumber and garlic paste into the yogurt, then rub the dried mint between your palms over the bowl so its oils release as it falls in. Season with salt and taste — it should be clearly sour and properly salted, since chilling will mute both.
Chill and serve
Cover and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes so the garlic settles into the yogurt and the bowl gets genuinely cold. Serve in a shallow dish with a slick of olive oil across the surface and a dusting of pul biber or sumac, with a spoon in the bowl.

Tips from our kitchen.

Grate the cucumber, salt it and squeeze it hard in your hands or a clean cloth. Skipping this is why homemade cacık turns into a watery puddle after twenty minutes.
Rub the dried mint between your palms before it goes in. The friction and warmth release its oils, and the difference is obvious in the finished bowl.
Crush the garlic to a paste with a pinch of salt rather than chopping it. Chopped garlic gives sharp raw hits; a paste distributes evenly.
Use full-fat yogurt with a genuine sourness. Low-fat yogurt goes chalky once you thin it and tastes thin rather than tangy.
Add the cold water gradually and stop when it pours slowly from a spoon in a ribbon — thinner than a dip, thicker than milk.
Chill for at least half an hour before serving. Cacık is meant to be properly cold, and the garlic mellows into the yogurt as it rests.

Substitutions.

Dried mint → Fresh mint, finely chopped, plus a pinch of dried oregano: This makes a good bowl but a different one — fresh mint is bright and grassy where dried mint is dusty and warm. If you can find dried, use dried.
Full-fat Turkish yogurt → Greek yogurt thinned with extra water, or plain whole-milk yogurt: Greek yogurt is thicker and less sour, so it needs more water and a squeeze of lemon to get the balance right.
Fresh cucumber → Pickled cucumber, finely diced, with the salt reduced: A winter workaround used in some households. Sharper and saltier, so taste before adding any salt at all.

Variations.

Ayran: Thin the same yogurt much further with cold water and salt, leave out the cucumber, and you have Turkey's national drink — served frothy and ice cold.
Haydari: The thick counterpart: strained yogurt beaten with garlic, dried mint and sometimes feta, firm enough to scoop with bread. A meze rather than a spoonable side.
Cacık with walnuts: A Balkan-influenced version with crushed walnuts and a little olive oil stirred through, closer to tarator and noticeably richer.

Storage & reheating.

Cacık keeps 2 days refrigerated in a covered bowl, though the cucumber softens and the garlic strengthens noticeably by day two. Some liquid will separate on standing; stir it back in rather than pouring it off, and correct the salt before serving since chilling dulls seasoning. Do not freeze it — yogurt splits into grainy curds and water on thawing and cannot be brought back. If you want to prepare ahead, grate and squeeze the cucumber in advance and combine everything an hour before the meal.

Serve with

Grilled köfte or kebab, buttery pilav, and warm flatbread — cacık is a side, not a course.

The story behind Cacık.

Cacık belongs to a family of yogurt-and-cucumber preparations that stretches from the Balkans to South Asia, and each version differs mainly in consistency and herb. Greek tzatziki is thick enough to hold a spoon upright and leans on fresh dill and lemon. Bulgarian and Macedonian tarator is thinned further still, often with walnuts stirred in, and is sometimes drunk from a glass. Persian mast-o-khiar adds raisins and dried rose. Indian raita uses fresh cucumber with roasted cumin. Cacık sits toward the loose end of that spectrum: thinner than tzatziki, always with dried mint, and understood as something you spoon rather than scoop bread through.

The word itself is Turkish, and the dish is old enough that its migration across the region cannot be traced to one point of origin — yogurt-making, cucumbers and garlic have all been present in Anatolia and the surrounding lands for a very long time. What is worth noticing is what the differences say about how each cuisine eats. The thicker Greek version works because it is served with bread and grilled meat as part of a meze table. The looser Turkish one works because it is eaten with a spoon between mouthfuls of pilav and kebab, functioning as a cold, sour counterweight rather than a condiment.

In Turkish homes cacık is summer default. It goes with köfte, with karnıyarık, with anything from the grill, and it is a standard part of the fasting-month iftar table because it rehydrates as much as it feeds. The garlic quantity is a genuine matter of household opinion: some families use a single clove for a whole bowl, others make it fierce enough to clear a room. Dried mint, however, is not negotiable — using fresh mint instead produces something perfectly pleasant that Turkish cooks would not call cacık.

Questions, answered.

What is the difference between cacık and tzatziki?

Consistency and herb, mainly. Turkish cacık is thinned with cold water until you can eat it with a spoon, and it is flavored with dried mint. Greek tzatziki is strained thick enough to scoop with bread, and typically uses fresh dill and lemon. They come from the same regional family of yogurt-and-cucumber dishes and neither is a version of the other — they simply sit at different points on the same spectrum.

Why does my cacık turn watery?

Cucumber is more than 95% water and releases it into the yogurt as it sits. Grate the cucumber, toss it with salt, leave it 10 minutes and then squeeze it firmly in your hands or a clean cloth before mixing. That removes most of the liquid, keeps the seasoning where you want it, and stops the bowl from separating within the hour.

Can I use fresh mint instead of dried?

You can, but it will not taste like cacık. Dried mint has a warm, dusty, almost tea-like flavor that survives sitting in cold yogurt, while fresh mint is grassy and fades fast. Dried mint is cheap and sold in every Middle Eastern and Turkish grocer, and it is one of the most useful jars to keep. Rub it between your palms as you add it.

How thin should cacık be?

Loose enough to fall off a spoon in a slow ribbon — noticeably thinner than a dip but not as thin as a drink. Turkish restaurants often serve it almost soupy, and in high summer with ice cubes in the bowl. Start with a few tablespoons of cold water per cup of yogurt and add more gradually until it moves the way you want.

What do you eat cacık with?

Anything grilled or rich: köfte, kebab, lamb chops, stuffed vegetables, buttery rice pilav. It functions as a cold sour element that resets the palate between bites, which is why it appears on almost every Turkish summer table and at iftar during Ramadan. It is eaten with a spoon alongside the meal rather than used as a dip for bread.

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