Tas kebabı

Cubes of lamb or beef browned in butter and cooked slowly with onion, tomato and a little water until the meat is tender and the sauce has thickened, then turned out from a bowl onto a bed of rice pilaf: tas kebabı is a kebab that never sees a skewer. The name comes from the tas, the metal bowl in which the stew was traditionally cooked, sealed with dough and buried in embers or set in the oven, and from which it is still unmoulded for serving, so the pilaf wears a dome of meat. It is a lokanta and home dish found across Türkiye, an Ottoman kitchen staple with relatives in the Balkans and Greece, where tas kebap has the same name and the same method. It is not a grilled dish and should not be judged as one; it belongs with the sulu yemek, the stewed dishes, and its measure is the sauce.