Recipes

Lahmacun

Pizza · Pizza Oven · Breads · Turkish · Lamb

Lahmacun
Prep 1 hr
Cook 2 min each
Serves 6–8
Level Medium

Turkey’s thin flatbread with a spiced lamb topping, rolled paper-thin and baked in under two minutes, then rolled up with lemon, parsley and red onion. From chef Selin Kiazim.

Untested: I have not cooked this one yet — the pizza oven has not been bought. It is here for the Pizza Ovens dive, and it is adapted from the source named in the Notes.

Ingredients

Dough

  • 625 g strong white bread flour
  • 12 g fresh yeast (or 7 g instant dry yeast)
  • 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
  • 1 teaspoon fine sea salt
  • 1 teaspoon caster sugar
  • 350 ml lukewarm water

Topping

  • 375 g lamb mince
  • 2 plum tomatoes
  • ½ red pepper
  • ½ bunch parsley

½ brown onion

  • 3 cloves garlic
  • 8 g Turkish chilli flakes
  • 60 g tomato purée
  • 15 g hot pepper paste (acı biber salçası)
  • 75 g lamb suet, minced
  • 5 g salt
  • 30 ml sunflower oil

To finish

  • Lemon juice, picked parsley and thinly sliced red onion

Directions

  1. Dough. Mix the dough ingredients with a dough hook about 5 minutes until smooth and elastic. Divide into balls of 85–100 g, cover and refrigerate until needed.
  2. Topping paste. Blend the tomatoes, pepper, parsley, onion and garlic to a semi-coarse paste. Tip it into a sieve and squeeze out all the liquid — a wet topping makes a soggy base.
  3. Mix. Mix the dry vegetable paste with the chilli, suet, salt, tomato purée, pepper paste and oil, then work in the lamb by hand.
  4. Heat the oven on full flame until very hot.
  5. Roll each ball very thin on a well-floured surface, keeping it moving. Press the meat on as thin as possible, leaving a little dough bare at the edge.
  6. Bake 1½–2 minutes, turning. Finish with lemon juice, parsley and red onion, and roll it up to eat.

Notes

Source Adapted from Selin Kiazim, “Lahmacun (Turkish Pizza),” on Gozney’s recipe pages, baked in a Roccbox on full flame. Her page gives the oven as “about 450/500 degrees” without a unit — on a UK page that reads as °C (about 840–930 °F), but it is not stated.

Quantities The page does not give amounts for the lemon, parsley and red onion to finish.

Temperatures are for the oven floor (stone), read with an infrared thermometer. A pizza oven’s built-in gauge reads the air, which runs much hotter.

The Pizza Ovens dive on the Food site covers the oven, the fire and the dough in depth.