3 dishes people actually cook in Bangladesh: what they are, how long they take, and what you need to buy.
What can you cook from Bangladesh? 3 traditional Bangladesh dishes, from Ilish bhaja (40 min, the quickest) to Kacchi biryani (540 min, the longest). Each recipe is written step by step with full ingredient lists, free to read.
Bangladesh on the map. Drag to spin the planet.
The dry, grainy khichuri: the moong dal is dry-roasted and the grains fried in ghee, so it finishes like a pilaf rather than a porridge.
Hilsa steaks rubbed with nothing but turmeric and salt and fried in smoking mustard oil, which is then poured over rice as ilisher tel.
The mutton goes into the pot raw, marinated in yogurt and mustard oil, and cooks only from the steam trapped under a dough-sealed lid.
Copper documents three dishes from Bangladesh: Bhuna khichuri, Ilish bhaja and Kacchi biryani. Ghee and mustard oil each appear in more than one recipe. All three are fried. Not one needs an oven — they cook entirely on the hob. Between them they use 26 different ingredients.
The three recipes need 26 ingredients between them, of which 3 are shared by more than one dish. Mustard oil and turmeric powder the hardest to find: of the 586 dishes in Copper's atlas, 2 use mustard oil and 3 use turmeric powder. Every ingredient list on this page is complete, with quantities, and free to read.
Ilish bhaja is the quickest at 40 minutes. Kacchi biryani is the longest at 540 minutes, most of it unattended. The median is 70 minutes — a weekend dish rather than a weeknight one.
Ilish bhaja is rated easy — start there. The full method is on its recipe page, step by step, free to read.
Bangladesh is part of South Asian.
Countries close to Bangladesh on the globe — and close on the plate.
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