The Donair, Canada’s Kebab

A few years ago, a food blog local to Halifax, Nova Scotia called Eat This Town caught my attention after they linked back to my history of the club sandwich. I ended up following the blog’s Twitter account and over time became friendly with its author, Lindsay Wickstrom. The blog doesn’t play favorites when it comes to the food of Halifax–it covers everything from tacos to ramen bowls, from burgers to burritos, and even takes the occasional out-of-town trip to cover food in far-flung places like Chicago. Lindsay herself has a particular passion when it comes to the local fare though. Lindsay is an expert in (and published author on) the subject of eastern Canada’s answer to the gyros sandwich popular in the US–or the doner kebab sandwich popular everywhere else–the Donair.

The Donair starts with spiced ground beef cooked on a vertical spit, much like the gyros cones so commonplace in Chicago. The beef is shaved off the spit and served in pitas–Lindsay points out frequently that these are not the pocketless pitas of a Greek gyros, but rather the puffier type of pitas, with a hollow center that can be used as a pocket (but isn’t for this sandwich) made in the Levant. The meat is topped with diced onion and tomato as opposed to the slices of onion and tomato more common to a gyros, and dressed with a sweet and sour garlicky sauce based on evaporated milk.

It had been my hope to travel to Halifax this autumn and really get the authentic local experience–catch a hockey game, check out the local nightlife, sample a few too many beers at one or more of the local breweries, then cap off the evening with a donair or three at Pizza Corner to soak up the alcohol. Even after we had to cancel our Vietnam trip in March and our New York City trip in May, even as more sandwiches added to the list pushed the Donair further back in the year, I held out hope that Mindy and I would be able to make it there this year.

By the time September rolled around and we canceled the annual family hog roast though, it was clear that travel was going to have to be put off for some time yet. Halifax was not going to happen for us, not this year. So I bought myself a copy of Lindsay’s newly published Book Of Donair–a history and exhaustive document of the Donair in all its variations, complete with a recipe!–and I also finally pulled the trigger on a piece of kitchen gadgetry that I had long thought about acquiring, but had not been able to justify to myself before now. After spending a week or two trying to decide whether to describe it to people as a “shawarma machine” or a “vertical spit” or a “trompo,” I have decided that it is called MEAT TORNADO. MEAT TORNADO is not a brand name for this device–in fact, when I google the phrase, it appears to be associated with something entirely different, a Ron Swanson gag from Parks & Rec. The phrase MEAT TORNADO though is descriptive, amusing to me, and seems to satisfy everyone’s curiosity, or at least end a lot of conversations.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Jim (@jimthebeerguy)

I used it at the end of August to make tacos arabes, a taco of spit-roasted marinated pork served with a spicy, smoky chipotle sauce in a flatbread called pan arabes that is somewhere between a flour tortilla and a pita. The taco arabes were an enormous success. I used it to make tacos al pastor–a more familiar type of spit-roasted marinated pork taco–at my mom’s house on Labor Day weekend. Unfortunately that day we had problems getting the MEAT TORNADO to stay lit in the windy backyard and ended up having to finish some of the meat in a pan. They were still delicious, but the experience of making them was kind of a pain in the ass.

The al pastor experience soured me a bit on the MEAT TORNADO and it spent the intervening months on a shelf in my garage. Meanwhile, Donair were pushed back on the Sandwich Tribunal schedule from October, to November, and finally to December, and I think now I am ready. It is time once again to employ the MEAT TORNADO.

The recipe in Lindsay’s book calls for 3lbs of lean finely-ground beef, and is intended to be baked in loaf pans and then sliced and finished under the broiler. I doubled that recipe to make an amount appropriate for the MEAT TORNADO. I don’t want to share Lindsay’s recipe–you’ll have to buy the book for that–but anyone who’s made gyros won’t be surprised by the contents.

My observations after having tasted it is that the donair meat is far less salty than the typical gyros cone, and also much spicier thanks to the inclusion of a good amount of cayenne pepper. Like a meatloaf, the recipe uses bread crumbs to help retain fat and moisture in the meat. I may have strayed from Lindsay’s recipe just a touch by using a fattier-than-recommended type of ground beef. I also clearly need much more practice building a meat cone.

The MEAT TORNADO has an electric motor but a pair of heating elements that burn propane. It is difficult to tell, in the light, whether they are burning without putting your hand close enough to one of them to feel the heat. However, in a dimmer situation–like my garage with the door shut–the fire can be seen more easily.

The MEAT TORNADO doesn’t take too long a time–maybe 45 minutes or so, depending on how high the burners are set–to cook the outside of the donair cone. Once the outside is nicely browned–perhaps slightly less browned than seen below–it is ready to be cut into and served.

As with other kebabs of this type, Donair are said to be best when cut directly from the spit and onto the bread they’ll be served in. The less time between the fire and one’s mouth the better. However, Lindsay points out that at many current Donair stands, a griddle full of meat may be used to steam a coldish pita back to life, and that the pita may in fact be griddled in some of the donair fat, adding an additional layer of flavor to the sandwich.

The construction of a donair is simple. Starting with the pita, we add some meat sliced from the spit and additionally crisped up on the griddle. I like my donairs like I like my gyros–generous, but slightly less than overstuffed. I like to be able to wrap the pita around the meat.

Atop the donair meat goes a scattering of diced onion and diced tomato. I imagine that this is another fungible quantity. I want enough to know it’s there but not enough to be distracting.

Finally, there is the sauce. In some of the book’s historical notes, Lindsay mentions that some Donair joints originally tried to serve the sandwiches with tzatziki sauce, as is used with gyros. However, the Nova Scotian palate prefers this sauce, which combines the flavors of sweet and sour, milk and garlic. The recipe from the book calls for dissolving sugar and garlic powder in evaporated milk, then pouring in vinegar, which curdles the milk to thicken the sauce. I’m afraid my milk didn’t curdle terribly well, and my sauce was quite thin as a result.

You should be able to make it out though, a milky glaze atop the tomatoes, pooling slightly in the upper left of the pita.

I’m sorry, Halifax. I am not a fan of this sauce.

The overall impression of the donair is good–very familiar, like a gyros. I don’t even mind the sweetness of the sauce all that much. But the sweetness and the milkness and the garlic-powderiness all together didn’t really work for me.

I’d still like to come to Halifax some day and try it there–God knows it’s likely enough for me to just get something terribly wrong. This could be a fantastic sandwich that I would otherwise be missing out on. But in the meantime, after making donairs for a family of 5, I still have somewhat north of 4 pounds of donair meat left to use.

Luckily, the Book of Donair covers this contingency too. Apparently the various eateries in and around Halifax have invented numerous ways to serve donair meat. For example, the Donair sub. Better yet, its variant, the “Bubba sub,” which consists of donair meat on garlic bread with melted mozzarella cheese, no vegetables. The book does not specify whether this is served with the sweet sauce. I opted out.

Perhaps better loved than the various sandwiches that are made with donair meat though is the donair pizza. According to the book, it contains “donair meat, mozzarella, onion and tomatoes. Donair sauce is usually ladled on top after baking.”

I googled a few more recipes, looking for an out, but this seems to be fairly universal. The donair pizza eschews tomato sauce. Instead, diced onions and tomatoes are added directly to the pizza dough, topped with just a bare scattering of mozzarella, then donair meat, then more mozzarella.

After baking, the pizza looked far too beautiful for me to sully it by adding the sauce directly to the whole pie

Instead, I cut myself a slice, and then *sigh* added the sweet and sour and milky and garlicky sauce on my own plate.

The crust of the pizza turned out well–nice and thin in the center with a raised cornicione around the periphery. The donair meat is a fantastic pizza topping, and the tomatoes and onion, along with the fattiness of the meat itself, do a lot to keep you from missing the tomato sauce.

That sweet donair sauce–it’s not for me. At least not in this thin terrible rendition that I made.

I still have a good amount of donair meat left to use, and plenty of recipe ideas left in Lindsay’s book–Donair Poutine, Donair Nachos, Donair Egg Rolls. I have another idea though. A few months ago, I had a weird dream in which I was on a quest to try gyros pancakes with Patton Oswalt for some reason.

I had a dream last night that some nonexistent friend of ours was @pattonoswalt's assistant and we were all going out for gyro pancakes, which were some rare Greek delicacy with a made-up Greek name in said dream.

— Sandwich Death Panel Czar (@JimBehymer) February 18, 2020

I have also become aware of a delicious-looking type of Greek pancake called Tiganites, which are sometimes served sweet with honey and walnuts, sometimes savory with feta and onions. After a month in which I’ve eaten sandwiches made with donuts and fried chicken, pumpkin spice bologna and “arsenic sauce,” putting honey and walnuts and feta and donair meat on a Greek pancake doesn’t sound so strange. In fact, it sounds pretty great to me. It might make a good breakfast on New Years Day.

But that will make it too late for this post. We’re in the closing hours of this terrible year, and this weird month will soon be over. January will bring the Tribunal three new sandwiches to try, and we hope that 2021 brings us all better fortune. Thank you for reading! On behalf of all my friends who have made Sandwich Tribunal what it is over the years, I wish you all the happiest of New Years!