Quick & Easy Turkish Lahmacun Recipe • Turkey's For Life (2024)

A Turkish lahmacun recipe made with love? Very definitely yes! Add to that a generous sprinkling of patience, too!

I’m grateful to be writing this article because it means homemade lahmacun success has been achieved.

After previous experiments that didn’t result in the lahmacun we were looking for, this latest effort – and therefore now our Turkish lahmacun recipe that you see below – is the bingo moment!

A dough that is quick to make, easy to work with and that bakes well in the oven of your home kitchen.

‘Quick,’ ‘Easy’ – words all home cooks love to see when it comes to cooking Turkish food!

What Is Lahmacun?

If you’ve visited Turkey before, there’s a very strong chance you’ve tasted – and fallen in love with – lahmacun. Unless you’re vegetarian or vegan, of course!

Spicy, Meaty Flatbread

We’re talking about a slightly crisp, yet easy-to-roll, Turkish flatbread that is topped with spicy ground meat (the spicier the better for us) and baked in a hot oven.

Divine!

As with (perhaps equally famous) pide, lahmacun attracts the nickname of ‘Turkish pizza,’ particularly in holiday resorts.

It’s not our favourite description. Lahmacun is standalone deliciousness. As is a good Italian pizza. Let’s love each for what they are.

Whilst both are a circular flatbread with a topping, traditional lahmacun is made without yeast. It’s a very thin flatbread.

A Popular Street Food

These days, after being a speciality of southeastern Turkey, it plays a central role in Turkish cuisine and is enjoyed countrywide.

A much loved, popular street food – easily rolled to make wraps and eat on the go.

And it’s also enjoyed in relaxed eatery settings like pide restaurants. Go to any pide salonu and you’ll be able to order a lahmacun (or two), too.

In Armenia and countries around the Middle East, it is also much-loved (and ‘Armenian pizza’ is also a description). As with other dishes, the Ottoman Empire facilitated the spread of foods like lahmacun.

And, like the discussion surrounding many famous foods around the world, arguments as to the true origins of lahmacun are passionate.

For us, we are grateful for its existence! And now, we can make it at home, too.

So, if you’ve been missing this famous flatbread after falling in love with it on your travels, here’s our quick and easy delicious lahmacun recipe.

How To Make Lahmacun At Home

Making your own lahmacun is actually a great way to use up smaller amounts of minced meat. I made ours after Barry had made Izmir Köfte the night before and had not used all the meat we’d bought.

Two Turkish classics from one tray of meat!

When you’re eating out in Turkey, pide and lahmacun is cooked in minutes in fiercely hot stone ovens.

Obviously, this is the best way to cook it but most houses – ours included – don’t have that facility. We’re relying on our own little kitchen oven.

The homemade dough recipe we use works really well for a conventional home kitchen oven.

Making Your Lahmacun Dough

Don’t shy away from making your own lahmacun dough. It is so quick and easy because there is no yeast!

I’ve experimented with different flatbread recipes over the last few months and this one works so well. It’s a recipe from UK chef, James Martin but we leave out the yeast.

Simply add your flour, water, yoghurt and salt to a large bowl.

Mix everything together with a spoon at first. Then get your hand in there to incorporate the stray bits in your mixing bowl.

If it feels dry at first, don’t worry. Keep gathering and pressing it all together until you get a moist dough ball.

Now you can knead your dough for 3-4 minutes on a flat, clean surface. You will be able to feel the elasticity increase as you knead.

When you’re done, bring your dough together into a ball and place back into your mixing bowl. Then cover with a clean kitchen towel.

Leave it to rest in the fridge for at least 15 minutes. You can use this time to make your meat topping, if you haven’t already.

We’ve also made this dough the night before and only used it the following day.

That works really well, too, so make your dough in advance if you like. Make your dough ball and cover in cling film (or plastic wrap) and refrigerate.

For The Minced Meat Topping

If you really want to let the herbs and spices infuse into the meat, you can be organised and make your toppings in advance – the day before.

If you’re like us and not so organised, don’t worry. You can make your topping and use it immediately.

Unlike pizza and pide toppings, the topping on a lahmacun just teeters on that balancing point between being very finely chopped and being a paste.

No big chunks but not a complete paste, either.

So, we use a mini food processor to pulse our topping ingredients together.

• Use lamb mince (ground lamb) or beef mince (ground beef) or a mix of both. And for the best lahmacun, use meat with a fat content of around 20%. As well as a flavour boost, this allows the juices to ooze into your dough base as it cooks.
• Your onion and peppers just need to be roughly chopped. Peel your onion and deseed your peppers. We use long Turkish red peppers (kapya biber) and the long green pointed peppers (sivri biber) but a red and a green bell pepper will be fine.
• A fresh tomato moistens your meat mixture as well as adding flavour.
• We love a spicy lahmacun recipe so we add fresh chilli and some pul biber (hot red pepper flakes). You can leave these out if you like.
• Garlic, paprika and cumin all contribute to adding extra punch to the flavours.
• And the tomato paste adds an extra dimension to the flavour of the topping whilst also helping to make it more spreadable.

Time To Make Your Lahmacun

Now we’ve prepped the main ingredients of our lahmacun recipe, we can build it and cook it.

Before we do anything else, first things first: Turn your oven on to get to 230 degrees Clesius. You need a good hot oven!

Get a baking sheet (or a pizza stone, if you have one) and tear a piece of baking paper (parchment paper) to the same size as the sheet.

Now put the paper to one side and place the baking sheet in the oven to get as hot as possible.

Our dough makes four large lahmacun (approx 30 centimetres in diameter). So divide your dough into 4 equal parts. (You can make smaller ones if you like.)

Place one piece of your dough on a lightly floured surface and use your rolling pin to roll out a thin circle.

This is the most important thing: It must be a thin circle.

Then you can carefully transfer the thin dough circle to your baking paper. If you’re worried about it tearing, loosely roll it onto your rolling pin to transfer it and unroll it back onto the paper.

We spread a quarter of the meat mixture onto our dough, taking it as close to the edges as we can. And then we’re ready for the oven.

When your oven is nice and hot, remove the hot baking sheet. Quickly and carefully take the edges of each side of your baking paper containing the lahmacun and place it on the hot baking sheet.

Then put this on the very bottom shelf of the oven.

Heat rises from the bottom of the oven so this will help to cook your base faster, keeping it fresh and slightly crispy without it going heavy and doughy.

How To Enjoy Your Lahmacun

Clue for enjoying your lahmacun: A knife and fork isn’t necessary for eating it!

You can prepare this simple salad beforehand or make it up whilst your lahmacun is in the oven.

Unwritten rules for eating lahmacun: At the very least, a good squeeze of lemon juice. Fresh, lemon of course. And a few sprigs of fresh parsley.

Popular extras are thinly sliced onion sprinkled with sumac and some slices of tomato.

We love to drizzle our tomatoes with olive oil and nar ekşisi (pomegranate molasses). So lovely.

Lay a bit of the salad over the top of your cooked lahmacun. Then, either loosely roll it into a wrap, fold it in half, or cut it into small slices and eat it as finger food.

Turkish Lahmacun Recipe – FAQs

Our Delicious Turkish Lahmacun Recipe

Let’s make lahmacun…