Lahmacun, the Turkish pizza
Another very popular Turkish street food is lahmacun. It is a thin bread with a round or elongated shape. It is topped with spiced minced lamb or beef. You can then add fresh cherry tomatoes or other vegetables, pickles, parsley, chilli. In some ways it resembles another Turkish recipe, pide.
The Turkish pizza recipe
Lahmacun, or Turkish pizza, is a dish cooked in a wood oven, typically stuffed with minced meat, usually lamb, and tomato paste. Once ready, it is possible to further season the lahmacun with various types of vegetables, and spices such as cumin or paprika.
Its original recipe is slightly spicy, but you can adjust the quantity of chilli pepper to your taste and try one of the most delicious focaccias of the Turkish tradition to prepare an original dinner with an inimitable taste.
Among the ingredients to prepare the dough, flour, yeast, water and milk cannot be missing.
As for the filling, you can indulge yourself and add vegetables and spices (such as cumin and paprika) to the lamb and tomato. However, you can also add aubergines, cherry tomatoes, herbs, spinach and aromatic herbs of all kinds and flavors, to your liking.
Are you ready to leave your guests speechless and discover together how lahmacun is prepared?
Follow the procedure here in a few simple steps:
To prepare the lahmacun, you must first start with the dough. Then put the water and the milk cream to heat slightly. Then pour the flour into a pastry board, add salt and heat the yeast separately with the water.
To create the mixture, pour the yeast that you have previously softened with water, oil and cream onto the mound of flour placed on the pastry board. Knead until a tender dough is created and leave it aside covered with a cloth for about 30 minutes.
During the rising of the pizza dough you can take care of the sauce with which to fill the Turkish pizza. Then brown the onion in a pan, and add the minced lamb meat, the tomato paste and the spices. Once the pizza dough is ready, divide it into smaller blocks and create four separate ones, to be rolled out to form four pizzas.
Season the pizzas and brown each for a few minutes in a pan. At this point, cooking will not be completed yet: all that remains is to place each pizza on a baking sheet and place it in a preheated oven at 150 ° for about 15 minutes.
Curiosities about Turkish pizza
Throughout the world, pizza is the daughter of Italy, but it also has its ancestor and it is precisely the “pita”, already widespread about 5000 years ago in ancient Babylon.
The Turkish pita is actually a completely different dish and should not be confused with kebab, much less with pizza. It is a dry and very thin pizza, the so-called “lahmacun”, very different from the Italian pizza but which is worth tasting, in a Turkish restaurant or preparing it with your own hands at home.