Name: Reseña de Lahmacun por Yehanoha en Çarşıhan Lahmacun, Çankaya/Ankara, Türkiye
Item: Lahmacun
Rating: 5
Author: Yehanoha

Lahmacun takes two or three minutes in a very hot oven: a round of dough rolled thinner than a cracker, a little wider than a dinner plate, spread with a paste of minced lamb or beef, onion, tomato, red pepper and parsley. The name comes from the Arabic lahm bi ajin, meat with dough, which is a fair description of the whole dish. It is eaten across south-eastern Türkiye, Syria and Lebanon, and Armenians make a close relative they call lahmajo. In Türkiye the home ground is Gaziantep, Şanlıurfa and Adana, where it is a lunchtime order rather than a snack, and a single person will put away two or three. Calling it Turkish pizza misleads on the main point: there is no cheese, the topping is scraped on thinly rather than piled, and the base is closer to a cracker than a bread.

The dough is a plain flour, water, salt and a little yeast mixture, rested, then rolled or stretched to about two millimetres so it bakes through before the meat dries out. The topping is where the work is. Fatty meat is chopped fine with onion, tomato, biber salçası (red pepper paste), parsley and, depending on the town, garlic or pul biber; in Antep many ustas insist on a zırh, the curved knife, rather than a mincer, because grinding squeezes out the juice that should stay in the meat. The paste goes on with the back of a spoon or the fingertips until the dough shows through in places. The oven is the deciding factor: a stone-floored taş fırın running well above 400°C blisters the edge and sets the meat in the time it takes to slide the next one in. In a domestic oven the base steams and the meat cooks grey.

Judge a lahmacun on its base first. It should be crisp enough at the rim to snap and pliable enough in the middle to roll around a handful of parsley, sliced onion with sumac and a squeeze of lemon, which is how it is eaten: rolled, not cut. Look for charred freckles underneath and a topping that has caramelised at the edges but is still moist in the centre. A thick, bready base, a topping layered like a meat pie, or a sauce-like red paste that tastes mostly of tomato are all signs of a kitchen imitating pizza. Cold lahmacun reheated on a flat grill is acceptable in a kebapçı at four in the afternoon; one that has gone leathery is not. The acılı (spicy) version from Şanlıurfa carries real heat, so check which you ordered before marking it down.

Lahmacun

Türkiye

Çarşıhan Lahmacun

Gayet başarılı bir lahmacun, içi güzel yayılmış, hamuru ince, boyut büyük ve tek bir porsiyon ile doyulacak seviyede. İç harcı birbirini tamamlıyor. Yanında gelen eşlikçiler de güzel.

Reseña de Lahmacun por Yehanoha en Çarşıhan Lahmacun, Çankaya/Ankara, Türkiye

Lahmacun

Çarşıhan Lahmacun

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