Turkish · Main
Lahmacun
- Intermediate
- 60 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with acid holding everything up to the light, fresh herbs arguing happily on top, on a rich, rounded finish.
Ingredients
- Dough: 300g flour, 180ml water, 5g yeast, 1 tsp salt
- 250g finely minced lamb or beef
- 1 small onion, 1 tomato, ½ red pepper; all minced to a paste
- 2 tbsp tomato paste, pul biber, parsley
- Lemon, more parsley, sumac onions to serve
Equipment
Sheet pan
The skills inside
Resting dough: the pause that does the work
Allergen screen
Found: gluten
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Make a soft dough; rest 1 h. Divide into 6. 60 min
- Chop the topping almost to a wet paste: it must spread thin, not sit in chunks.
- Roll each round paper-thin; smear a thin skim of topping to the very edge.
- Bake at max heat on a steel or upside-down tray, 4–6 min. Roll around parsley and a squeeze of lemon; eat like a cigar. 6 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Resting dough: the pause that does the work 71 recipes
- It actually rested, covered, for the time stated, not cut short because the rest of the schedule was tight.
- It rolls and shapes without fighting: it stays where it is put, and it does not spring back or shrink on the bench between passes.
- The surface is smooth and supple rather than dry, cracked, or skinned over.
- It is at the temperature the next step needs: cold where the fat must stay solid, cool and relaxed where it must be rolled thin.
- Baked, it holds the dimensions it was shaped to rather than shrinking back from the edges of the tin or the rim of the dish.
Where it goes wrong The rest was skipped or shortened, so the gluten was still tight: the dough fought the pin and sprang back thick and uneven, then shrank down the sides of the tin in the oven.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Cabernet or Rioja Reserva
- Also Right
- Malbec
- From the Taps
- Porter
- Zero-Proof
- Pomegranate spritz
Lamb’s sweet grass-fat wants structure: tannin from Cabernet, smoke-echo from Rioja’s oak, or Syrah’s pepper for the spiced routes.
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