Lahmacun

Before you start

• an oven at its hottest, with a heavy tray or a stone heated in it
• the dough needs about 1h to prove

Ingredients

Serves 2 · dimmer marks are storecupboard

• 120gplain flour
• 90glamb mince
• 200gtomatoes and red peppers
• 1onion
• 1 handfulflat parsley
• 1 tbspTurkish pepper paste — biber salçası; tomato purée with a pinch of chilli will stand in
• 1 tspdried yeast
• 1 tspolive oil
• 1 tspcumin and paprika
• 1lemon

Method

7 steps

1. fold · 7m

   Flour, yeast, a teaspoon of salt, the oil and about 75ml of warm water worked together and kneaded until the dough is smooth and no longer sticks to the bowl.

2. rest · 1 hour walk away

   Covered, somewhere warm, until roughly doubled. The oven goes on at its highest setting for the last twenty minutes of this, with the tray inside it.

3. blend · 5m

   Tomato, pepper, onion, parsley, pepper paste and spices pulsed to a wet coarse paste and salted. Wet is correct — it dries out on the bread — and a paste blitzed to soup will soak straight through the dough.

4. chop · 9m

   Dough divided into four and each piece rolled out as thin as it will go, thin enough to see the board through. A thick one is a pizza; a lahmacun should roll up in one hand.

5. finish · 4m

   The thinnest possible smear of meat right out to the edges. Any deeper and it steams rather than roasts, and the middle stays raw while the rim burns.

6. roast · 14m

   Onto the hot tray one or two at a time until the edges blister and the meat has lost every trace of pink — minced lamb has to be cooked right through, and on something this thin that takes only a few minutes.

7. finish · 2m

   Lemon squeezed hard over the top, more parsley, and rolled while it is still hot enough to bend.