Lahmacun from the kamado

Lahmacun is the Turkish variant of the pizza. The bottom is thinner, and there is no cheese on it. You top the Turkish pizza with vegetables and sauce and then roll it up. Delicious as dinner but even better as a snack after an evening out.

The secret ingredient for our lahmacun. Full-fat yogurt. This gives you a more compact dough that, together with the sunflower oil, ensures that the bottom does not become crispy. This way, you can easily roll it up.

You knead the dough well so that a smooth dough is created. Roll it into a ball and coat it with a little sunflower oil. Then place the ball in a large bowl and cover it. Let the dough rise in the refrigerator overnight.

2 hours before you want to make lahmacun, divide the dough into 4 equal parts and roll 4 tight balls again. You let it rise again for 2 hours. Not in the refrigerator, but covered.

Meanwhile, you can light up the barbecue and cook the minced lamb. First, warm up the tomato paste and add the rest except for the fresh mint and the lemon zest.

You will add these last. Make sure you grate the lemon so that you only use the yellow part of the peel. The white part underneath is bitter and not tasty.

You can make a tasty tomato salad to top the lahmacun. These are some tomatoes, red bell pepper, white onion, fresh mint, and some lemon juice. Throw in some lettuce and a big dollop of garlic sauce, and you have a lahmacun pizza party.

The dough balls have become more flexible after 2 hours so that they can be rolled out. Sprinkle some flour on your work surface and roll the dough with a rolling pin to an equal thickness. Round is nice, but you can’t taste round, so it doesn’t matter.

Slide the uncooked bottom onto the pizza peel and then top it with a quarter of the minced lamb. This works best with a spoon so that you can spread the minced meat a little without scraping it off again.

By the way, this is the setup we use to bake pizza on a kamado. The plate setter on the grid. This allows the heat to enter the kettle well past the plate setter.

The pizza stone with a space in between goes on top of the plate setter. We have 3 metal corner pieces of 4 cm wide here. This space prevents the pizza stone from getting too hot. An additional advantage is that the pizza is nice and close to the lid where the heat is radiated back. If you now throw the bottom slide fully open and the top vent off, you can let the stone heat up for 20 minutes.

This is what we mean by the top vent fully open. You just take it off. The kamado now gets somewhere between 350 and 400°C at the top of the kettle. Because all heat can go well around the plate setter and the pizza stone is protected by the plate setter, the pizza stone does not get that hot. You can use this setup for all types of pizza.

Now the pizza is allowed on the stone. The flour that stuck to the bottom of the dough while rolling out is enough to prevent the bottom from sticking to the peel. If so, pull the side that is stuck up a little and sprinkle some extra flour underneath.

You can also check whether the bottom is sticking by shaking the shovel briefly. Then you quickly notice whether it sticks and where.

After 5 minutes, look through the top vent to see how far the pizza is. If you see that the edges are nice and brown, the pizza is ready. Depending on how hot your kamado is, this will take about 5 to 10 minutes.

This is what you want. A perfectly cooked top and bottom. And that always works if you make pizzas on the kamado this way.

Serve the Turkish pizzas with the salad and garlic sauce or your favorite hot sauce.