Outtasight Ottoman Flatbread: Lahmacun

Lahmacun is a type of flatbread popular in Turkey, in Armenia, in Bulgaria, and many former Ottoman states. It is sometimes referred to as Turkish pizza–but I’m not sure that is an accurate analogy. As my Turkish friend Deniz put it to me recently:

Lahmacun needs to be really thin. I think calling it Turkish pizza sets a weird expectation on the thickness. It’s not so much a flatbread or a pizza–it’s thin like filo pastry and should crack when you roll it.

Another friend with an ear to the ground in Turkey, Katie, explained that she’d hesitate to call lahmacun a specifically Turkish food due to its widespread popularity in southeastern Europe and western Asia. Even within the genre of Turkish lahmacun, she says, there is plenty of regional variance:

I would say it’s an Anatolian food that has been uniquely differentiated depending on where you eat it and was spread in popularity by the Ottoman Empire. For example, in western (Izmir) Türkiye, lahmacun is more aromatic and herbier with more emphasis on herbs like mint and parsley to balance the meat, but in eastern (Gaziantep) Türkiye, lahmacun is spicier, and can often be called Adana Lahmacun because Adana is the hottest city in the country. (They actually shoot the sun there it gets so hot in the summer!). But when you move closer to Armenia, Lahmacun becomes sweeter in profile, highlighting pomegranate molasses.

Lahmacun in Chicagoland

My first experience with lahmacun was… well now that I think of it, probably at the now-defunct Turkish restaurant Cafe Orchid on Addison, years ago when I was helping some friends with their bicycle food tour business Fork and the Road. We had a fairly epic stop with a large group at Cafe Orchid and ordered, I think, just about everything on the menu. However, the dish really came onto my radar a few years ago when my family and I met another friend at Istanbul Market & Cafe in Mount Prospect, Illinois for a lunch of Su Borek, a layered cheese-filled pastry; manti, meat-filled Central Asian dumplings; plov, an Uzbek dish of seasoned rice with carrot and lamb–a pilaf by another name, I suppose; pide, a flatbread filled in this case with sucuk and melted cheese; Turkish coffee; and of course lahmacun.

The Lahmacun at Istanbul Market & Cafe consisted of a thin, seemingly unleavened and relatively inflexible flatbread with a mixture of minced meat, spices, and vegetables baked right into it, served with parsley, tomatoes, red onions, and a lemon wedge as garnish. The method of eating lahmacun is to top a piece with some of the garnishes and fold it over into a taco-like shape, or roll it into a burrito-like wrap. The slight stiffness of this flatbread made rolling it difficult but we could just manage to fold it over. And frankly, it was delicious. I became slightly obsessed with lahmacun and began looking for places to order it closer to home.

A few weeks or a month later, I discovered that Istanbul Kebab House in Bridgeview also served lahmacun. Their version, which I ordered to go, came in a pizza box, with a separate foam clamshell for the garnishes. The pizza box contained 2 large folded-over ovals of a yeast-risen flatbread very much like a pizza crust, again with a spiced meat and vegetable mixture baked into it.

This dough was airy and flexible, leopard-spotted on the bottom with a bit of a cornicione at the edges–indistinguishable from pizza dough in fact, apart from the oval shape. I liked this very much as well, though it was quite different from the thinner, unleavened version at Istanbul Market & Cafe–and, as I more recently learned, much different from Deniz’s expectations of lahmacun as well.

But there are a lot of recipes for lahmacun out there that call for using premade pizza dough, like the kind in a bag in the refrigerated section at Trader Joe’s. In fact the dish is often nicknamed “Turkish pizza“–or “Armenian pizza,” depending on who you’re asking–though the pide pictured above seems perhaps to fit that description more aptly. The menu at Istanbul Market & Cafe calls it “Turkish pizza.” The menu at Turquoise, discussed below, calls lahmacun “Turkish pizza.” It may be an inapt comparison, but it’s a common one.

Yet the remainder of the lahmacun I’ve eaten has followed the unleavened, very thin pattern that I experienced at Istanbul Market & Cafe. Turquoise Cafe, a Turkish bakery and restaurant in Chicago’s Roscoe Village neighborhood, served it this way, garnishing with arugula instead of parsley, the standard thin-sliced red onion and wedge of lemon, along with a really poor wintry-stiff tomato.

Turquoise brought out a bread service that tasted far better than it looked along with a small plate of a carrot and eggplant salad or dip. We also ordered Hunkar Begendi, or “Sultan’s Delight,” cubes of tender braised lamb shank served over a smoky, cheesy eggplant puree, and I requested a cup of Ayran, a salty-sour yogurt-based cold drink I’ve been told is the thing to drink with lahmacun.

As you can see, the flatbread at Turquoise, while leopard-spotted like a great pizza crust, was super thin and flexible, folding niely around the garnishes with a bit of a crisp edge at the periphery.

Cafe Istanbul, at the south edge of Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood, had a similarly thin crust with a bit more char to it yet, crisper, almost like a cracker-crust pizza but not quite, still flexible enough to fold that flatbread around the garnishes. Like Turquoise, Cafe Istanbul provided arugula, sliced red onion, a lemon wedge, and a slice of (better) tomato.

This version was also good, though by the time I reached this restaurant I had almost lost interest in eating lahmacun. The thing I liked most about it though was the way it was arranged on the plate. There was something almost familiar about that shape

DIY Lahmacun

Katie had more to share about lahmacun, including a recipe from her husband’s anneanne, or maternal grandmother, that she says makes “literally the BEST lahmacun in all of eastern Türkiye.” The instructions started with an admonition (emphasis mine):

You cannot make perfect lahmacun outside of Anatolia. But if Katie wants to try, she can. If you don’t have a pizza oven, you can use convection. Heat it to 230C and it must be at full degree before you introduce the lahmacun.

As it happens, I recently acquired a pizza oven–electric rather than gas- or wood-fired. I have dreamt for years about having a big backyard domed brick pizza oven, but that seems like a lot of work. I have also looked with envy on the portable pizza ovens some of my friends and fellow foodies are working with–but unfortunately those run 2-3x as much as this. I had a pretty good experience with making lahmacun using it, though the warmup time it needs to get up to pizza-cooking temperature, i.e. 700° Fahrenheit (371° Celsius), was a bit longer than expected, 30 minutes or more.

Anneanne’s recipe continues (I’ll put a formatted version with my own tweaks below):

While you wait, prepare your dough. It is an easy dough, but do not rush. In a big bowl, put together 650g flour, 120ml yogurt, 250ml water, and 1 tsp salt. Knead for 3-4 minutes DO NOT RUSH and rest in fridge for at minimum 15 minutes.

While you wait, make your meat. In the food processor, or by hand like me, mince 200g minced lamb and beef mix meat (20% fat), 1 chopped onion, 1 green and 1 red bell pepper, 1 tomato, 2 garlic cloves, 2 tsp tomato paste, 2 tsp red pepper flakes, 1 tsp paprika, ½ tsp cumin, salt, and pepper. Put in the fridge to become aromatic for 10 minutes.

Now that the dough and meat have set, take the dough and make 4 balls. Flatten the balls into thin disc. Not too thin, but enough thin that it can become crispy. Place the dough on parchment and be careful for tears. Spread evenly the meat mix you have made, flattening to the dough. No clumps or bumps should be present. 

Take a pan and by itself, put it in the oven to become heated. Heat for 5 minutes (you can also keep your pan in the oven as it heats up in the beginning too, she says). Now the pan is heated, put the parchment and dough onto the pan on the bottom of the oven (bottom shelf if you have one close to the bottom) and close the oven. Bake for 10 – 15 minutes until edges are browned and crispy.

While baking, make a quick salad of onions and parsley with a healthy amount of Sumac. You must have a quarter lemon also for best taste.

Once finished, remove from oven, add onions, parsley and tomato if you like, squeeze lemon, and eat.

Fatmanür Bahadır

My initial attempts at rolling out the dough to the thinness required for good lahmacun were not great. The lahmacun pictured above was, I think, still crudely thick, not bending terribly well when wrapped around its garnishes. The lahmacun below was rolled out far more thinly, charred in spots, flexible but with a crisp surface that cracked when I tried rolling it around the garnishes.

And I think that’s probably as good as I’m going to get at Lahmacun. It’s a favorite in Eastern Europe and Western Asia for a reason–the savory meat and vegetable mixture, with its an extra umami punch from tomatoes and tomato paste, is aromatic and pungent from the onions, garlic, and green peppers, spicy with paprika and cumin and dried chilies. It glues itself to the flatbread as it bakes, remaining moist yet adhering itself to the surface. Once served, these flavors are punctuated by the lemony-sour and pungent sumac onions, savory-sweet tomatoes, and the peppery note of parsley. Lahmacun is, nearly, a perfect food, and I recommend that everyone try it if they haven’t.