On our very first day in Istanbul we ate in a tiny pide restaurant. The first thing to arrive on the table was a small pot of spicy red pepper paste, a dish of butter and a plate of crumbled white lor cheese. We ate these with big puffed-up rounds of flat bread, straight from the wood-fired oven, and thought we’d arrived in heaven. This is our version of the pepper paste – it is quite chilli-hot, so a little goes a long way. Serve it on warm flat bread with chilled unsalted butter and lor. If you can’t get hold of lor, then another crumbly white cheese, such as Wensleydale or a mature goat’s cheese, will do nicely.