100 Easy 5 Ingredient Recipes for Real Weeknights

This is the smallest section here and the one people ask for most. A simple 5 ingredient dinner has nowhere to hide, so technique carries it: brown the pork properly, salt the salad before it meets the dressing, season the rice while it is still steaming. Some of these are ten-minute assemblies. The beef stew wants fifty. All of them are things I have put in front of other people without apologising first.

Nothing in this section is dinner on its own, and that is exactly the point. Ginger garlic paste in the freezer, a jar of pesto, a masala you ground yourself — these are what make the rest of the week's cooking short. Most take ten to fifteen minutes and then keep for days or weeks. This is where minimal ingredient cooking pays compound interest: do the work once, spend nothing later.

Six drinks, all built from short lists, all better than what you would otherwise reach for. Nobody thinks of a glass as cooking, but the same logic that governs few ingredient recipes applies here too. The lassi and the buttermilk are hot-weather staples in Indian kitchens for good reason: yogurt thinned and salted does more for you at three in the afternoon than anything cold and fizzy. The ginger shots are punishing in a way some people genuinely enjoy. The shaken coffee needs no equipment beyond a bottle with a lid on it.

Breakfast is where few ingredient recipes make the most obvious difference, because nobody is doing knife work at seven in the morning. Half of these are assembled the night before and opened cold. The rest are four to eight minutes in a microwave or a small pan. These are the 5 ingredient meals I lean on hardest, simply because the margin for error at that hour is zero. One rule worth learning early: protein powder seizes in boiling oats, so stir it in after the heat is off, with a splash of milk to loosen it. Two Ugandan porridges sit here too, and they deserve a much wider audience than they have.

Thick yogurt is the single most useful thing on this page. Strain it and it becomes cheese. Whip it with cocoa and it stiffens like frosting. Fold mango pulp through it and it is srikhand. This section runs from a plain three-part bowl you throw together half-asleep to a steamed Bengali bhapa doi that could close a dinner party, which is a fair demonstration of what few ingredient recipes can stretch to. If your yogurt is thin, hang it in a cloth over a bowl for an hour and everything downstream improves.

The biggest section, because this is what people genuinely make from a short list at eleven at night — the sweet end of minimal ingredient cooking, where a spoon is usually the only equipment. Cookie doughs and cake batters you eat raw, rice cakes loaded until they stop being austere, a mug cake, two tiramisus, coconut laddu, Yemeni masoub. A word on raw flour: heat-treat it, or use oat flour, or stick to the doughs built on protein powder and nut butter. And when a dough refuses to come together, it needs fat, not water.