Southern Pizza with Ground Meat

Sample Dishes from Turkish Cuisine

Southern Pizza with Ground Meat (Lahmacun)

Preparation

Sift the flour into a large dish and reserve 1 cup flour. Add 1 1/4 tablespoon salt to the remaining flour, mix and make a whole in the middle. Blend the yeast and sugar with ¼ cup water, pour into the whole and sprinkle with some flour. Leave in a warm environment for about 10 minutes to allow the yeast to rise. Add ½ cup oil and gradually adding the yogurt, make a soft dough. Knead for 7-8 minutes until it no longer sticks to hands and leave to rise for an hour, keeping the warm temperature stable. Peel the onions and the garlic, wash and chop very finely. Wash the tomatoes, green peppers and parsley, remove the stem and seeds of the green peppers, seperate the parsley leaves. Chop the tomatoes into half a centimeter cubes, and the peppers 2-3 milimeter thick. Chop the parsley finely. Mix the tomatoes, peppers, onion, parsley and the ground meat adding and mixing ¼ cup water, red pepper paste and the seasoning. Divide the dough into eight equal pieces. Grease a baking pan with 1 tablespoon oil. Roll out each piece of dough with floured hands into half a centimeter thick round pastries. Spread each piece with the ground meat filling, leaving a border of 1 centemeters from the edge of the dough. Bake for 10 minutes in pre-heated moderate oven.

Servings: 8

Nutritional Value
(in approximately one serving)

Notes

It is the famous meat dish of Gaziantep which is given different names according to the ingredients used (garlic, pomagranate molasses, onion etc.) In commercial bakeries oil and yogurt are not added to the dough.