Name: Maçka İşkembe
Address: Yenişehir, Demokrasi Cd. No:74, İzmit, Kocaeli, 41050, TR
Telephone: (0262) 313 00 11
Price range: €€
Rating: 4.1

Türkiye

Turkey

Maçka İşkembe

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

Red lentils simmered with onion, carrot and sometimes potato until they collapse, blended smooth, and served with lemon wedges, a drizzle of butter coloured with red pepper, and bread: mercimek çorbası is the soup on every Turkish lokanta menu, the one ordered before a kebab, at breakfast after a night out, and at home when someone is ill. It is the most common soup in the country and the one most often made badly, because it is cheap and assumed to be simple. The southern version, ezogelin, adds bulgur, rice, mint and tomato paste and keeps some texture; the plain mercimek is the western and central standard, pale orange and velvet-smooth. Every region and most kitchens have a version, and the differences come down to the fat, the thickness and whether the lemon is squeezed in the pot or at the table.

Finely chopped onion is sweetened in butter or oil, sometimes with a spoon of flour cooked in to give body, then red lentils, rinsed, go in with diced carrot and potato if used, and water or stock, roughly five parts liquid to one of lentils. It simmers for twenty-five to thirty-five minutes, skimmed, until everything is soft, then it is blended until completely smooth and thinned to a pouring consistency; it should coat a spoon but not stand up on it. Seasoning is salt and black pepper, cumin in many kitchens, and the soup is finished at the table with the three things that make it: a squeeze of lemon, a spoon of butter heated with pul biber or sweet paprika poured over the surface, and dried mint rubbed between the fingers. Croutons or crispy fried bread are common in restaurants. The soup thickens as it stands and is loosened with water when reheated.

Taste it before the lemon: it should already have flavour, of lentil and onion and butter, with the salt right; a bland base that depends entirely on the lemon and the pepper butter has been made with water and no care. It should be smooth, with no graininess or skins, and the colour should be a warm orange, not grey or brown. The butter should arrive hot on top, red with pepper, not stirred in beforehand and lost. Mark down a soup that is thin and watery, one that has been held so long it has set into a paste, a flour-heavy version that tastes of roux, a scorched bottom-of-the-pot note, and a bowl served lukewarm. Lemon should be fresh and offered as a wedge, not pre-squeezed. A good mercimek çorbası costs almost nothing to make, which is why a bad one is inexcusable.

Mercimek çorbası

Gözümüz de karnımı da doydu. Ne ipince ne kapkalın bir lahmacun. Yatay dürüm yaparsanız salataları içine sığdırabilirsiniz :d yanında gelen soğanın limonun falan miktarınu artırın da dolu dolu lahmacun dürelim. Yine de güzeldi çok yağlı da değildi 

Sımsıcak bir çorba, ilk yutuşta içinizi ısıtıyor. İlk kaşığı içerken üflemeden yemeyin. Mekan kalabalık çünkü çorba iyi. Dengeli bir çorba 

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