Dough rolled until you can almost see through it, spread with a thin paste of minced lamb, pepper and tomato, and baked in a furnace-hot oven for four minutes. Rolled up around salad and lemon and eaten with hands.
Mix the flour, yeast, sugar and salt. Add the warm water and olive oil and bring it together, then knead for 8 to 10 minutes until smooth and elastic. Cover and leave to rise until doubled, about an hour.
Put the pepper, onion, garlic, tomato and parsley in a food processor and pulse to a coarse paste. Tip it into a sieve and let it drain for 10 minutes, pressing gently. The topping must be dry or the base turns to soup.
Combine the drained vegetable paste with the lamb, tomato purée, red pepper paste, Aleppo pepper, cumin and salt. Work it with your hands until it is completely smooth and spreadable — closer to a paste than a mince.
Put a baking steel, pizza stone or heavy upturned tray on the top shelf and heat the oven to its maximum, 250°C or higher, for at least 30 minutes. A domestic oven cannot match a lahmacun oven, so the preheated surface is doing the work.
Divide the dough into six. Roll each one out on a floured surface to about 25cm across and as thin as you can get it without tearing — thinner than you think is right. Lahmacun is not pizza; the base should be a wrapper, not a crust.
Spread a thin, even layer of the lamb paste right to the edges — about 3mm. Slide onto the hot surface and bake for 4 to 6 minutes, until the edges are blistered and the meat is cooked through. It should still be pliable enough to roll.
Pile parsley, sliced onion tossed with sumac and a hard squeeze of lemon down the middle, roll it up and eat it with your hands.
Lahmacun has no cheese, a far thinner base, and a topping that goes on raw as a paste rather than as separate ingredients. It bakes in four minutes and is rolled up and eaten by hand, not sliced.
The topping was too wet. Drain the blitzed vegetables in a sieve before mixing them with the lamb — this is the step most recipes skip and it is the one that decides the texture.
Yes. Turn a heavy baking tray upside down and preheat it for 30 minutes. You want a hot surface to slide the dough onto; a cold tray bakes the base slowly and dries the topping out before the bottom crisps.
PAPA Restaurant & Cafe · 12–14 Station Parade, Willesden Green, London NW2 4NN · 07450 254441