A long skewer of minced lamb or beef, grilled over charcoal, rolled tightly inside a sheet of lavash, cut into slices and served with a tomato-butter sauce and a pool of garlic yoghurt: the beyti is the kebab that Istanbul made rather than inherited. It takes its name from Beyti Güler, whose restaurant in the Florya district has operated since 1945; his original beyti of the 1960s was a cut of lamb wrapped in its own fat, and the wrapped-and-sliced version served everywhere today is a later development that borrowed his name. Within the kebab family it sits closest to Adana and Urfa, since the meat is the same hand-chopped mince on a flat skewer; what makes it a beyti is the lavash, the slicing, and the sauce. It is a dish of knife and fork, not of the hand, and in a kebapçı it is one of the more expensive orders.

The meat is prepared as for an Adana or Urfa skewer: fatty lamb or a lamb-beef mix chopped fine with onion, salt, pepper and red pepper, kneaded, rested cold and pressed along a wide skewer. It is grilled over charcoal until browned and just cooked, then laid on a thin lavash that has been warmed on the grill, often with a line of melted butter or a scatter of parsley, and rolled as tight as a cigar. The roll is cut on the diagonal into pieces three to four centimetres long and arranged on the plate, sometimes brushed with butter and returned to the grill or oven for a minute so the lavash crisps at the edges. The sauce is tomato, fresh or paste, cooked briefly in butter with a pinch of salt and sometimes pul biber, poured over or beside the slices; thick süzme yoghurt with crushed garlic goes alongside, and grilled peppers and tomato complete the plate.

Score the meat as you would an Adana: coarse, juicy, seasoned so lamb leads, with some char and no dryness. Then look at the roll. The lavash should be thin and clinging, soft where it meets the meat and lightly crisp at the cut edges, not thick, doughy or soggy. The slices should hold together when lifted. The sauce should taste of tomato and butter, hot and not sweet, and it should not drown the plate; the yoghurt should be cold, thick and garlicky enough to register. Mark down a beyti built from pre-cooked or pressed meat, a lavash that has turned to paste under the sauce, cold slices that were rolled long before service, ketchup-like sauce, and a version without yoghurt. A plate where the sauce and yoghurt have been mixed into one pink puddle before it arrives has been assembled by someone who did not care.

Ezgi Uğur

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