Kofte

Anybody have a good kofte (ground lamb kebab) recipe? The mood is right but I am striking out on recipes


Thanks

[Jenise]

I have an excellent one! Let me find Mrs. Bezjian's book, and I'll post.

Simple and delicious...

Best
Rogov

Lamb Kebabs (Kofte)

1 lb. (450 gr.) each ground beef and lamb, mixed together or 2 lbs (900 gr) ground lamb
8 spring onions, whites and greens, chopped finely
5 cloves garlic, chopped finely
2 hot red peppers, chopped finely
1 tsp. each salt and pepper
1/2 tsp. each turmeric, dill seed and flour

Combine all of the ingredients in a mixing bowl and knead well by hand. Form into 3" (8 cm.) sausages and impale these on long wooden skewers. Grill over open charcoals or under a hot broiler, turning occasionally so that cooking is uniform. Cook just until the meat is done. Serve hot.

And, if it tempts you, a traditional accompaniment:

Bean Salad

2 cups dried lima beans
salt to taste
1/2 cup spring onions, chopped coarsely
1/4 cup onion, chopped finely
1/4 cup olive oil
2 Tbsp. each wine vinegar and chopped parsley
pepper and Tabasco sauce to taste

Wash the beans under cold running water. Transfer to a large saucepan and cover with hot water. Let stand in the water 2 - 3 hours.

Bring the water to a boil and then simmer gently for 2 hours. Skim carefully, add salt to taste and let cook until the beans are tender (about 30 minutes longer). Drain the beans well and transfer to a salad bowl. Add the remaining ingredients and mix well. Let cool, cover and refrigerate. Serve well chilled.

John, we prepared a number of Turkish dishes in preparation for a trip to Instanbul and, in particular, to explore the many ways they use eggplant and/or lamb in various dishes. We loved this version from "Saveur"; it works well with loquats and various other fruit -- especially here with figs.

Ground Lamb Meatballs with Loquats

3/4 lb. lean ground lamb or beef
1/4 cup finely chopped fresh parsley
1 clove garlic, peeled and minced
3/4 tsp. baharat kariºimi [Penzy's has a good version of this mixture; we add a bit more mint]
Pinch cayenne
2 tsp. flour
2 tbsp. soda water
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
10 loquats, fresh or canned
Vegetable oil
1/2 tsp. pomegranate molasses,
diluted in 2/3 cup water
1 tsp. fresh lemon juice
2 tbsp. chopped scallions


1. Mix together lamb, 3 tbsp. parsley, garlic, baharat, cayenne, flour, and soda water in a medium bowl. Season to taste with salt and pepper, then form into 16 meatballs.


2. If using fresh loquats, trim ends, halve each, and remove pits and inner membrane. If using canned, drain, then halve.


3. Preheat broiler. Alternate loquats with meatballs on 4 long metal or wood skewers (soak wood skewers for 1/2 hour in water before using), then brush lightly with oil. Place skewers on a baking sheet and broil, turning several times, until meat is browned all over, about 8 minutes. (Alternately, grill over a charcoal fire.)


4. Once meat is browned, slide meat and loquats off skewers and into a nonstick skillet. Add diluted pomegranate molasses and lemon juice. Cover and simmer over medium-low heat until sauce has thickened and coats meat well, about 20 minutes. Remove from heat and serve garnished with scallions and remaining 1 tbsp. parsley.

SERVES 4 – 8


This recipe was first published in Saveur in Issue #27

Turkish? TURKISH???

We are going to have an ethnic dispute here.

Kufteh is a Persian dish, it is more or less the national dish of Iran. Chelokebab means rice plus meat.

And as I have seen it, it is generally cooked on a sword-shaped skewer, a flat blade, which makes it easier to turn over on the fire.

My best Persian cookbook, Food of Life (New Food of Life) by Najmieh Batmanglij has several variations, including Kufteh tabrizi, Kufteh berenji, and Kufteh somaq.

The recipes in this cookbook are not skewer-cooked but cooked as meatballs in the oven. The recipes are not all that different from what has been posted but if anyone is curious I can type them in.

[Jenise]

Yes Turkish! (Bob, I've got your back here.) Kofte, also spelled kufte and any number of other ways, would appear to have travelled many miles (silk road?) and is also considered a classic Turkish dish: skewered and grilled, baked and even a deep-fried delection in which the highly seasoned meat is nestled inside a bulgur wheat hull. My first experience with this dish was served by an Armenian family (by way of Lake Van, Turkey) whose family recipe is more similar to Bob's than Rogov's but with ground allspice and mint. Never had a version I didn't love, though.

Would be interesting to know the source of John's familiarity with the dish.

The word "Kofte" is the Persian word for "minced"

However, the nomadic tribes within Iran are largely Turkic speaking people and there has been a great cultural admixture.

For example most of the "Persian Carpets" known in America come from people who speak Turkic languages at home.

So I can concede the possibility that the recipe may have come to Iran with the Turks 1000 years ago or so. But that would imply that they (the Persians) had not thought of chopping their lamb into mincemeat and forming it into patties. Clearly this is a leap of judgement?

Look:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meatball

Turkish? TURKISH???

We are going to have an ethnic dispute here.

Kufteh is a Persian dish, it is more or less the national dish of Iran. Chelokebab means rice plus meat.

Our guide at Ephesus was a wonderful cook, and she gave me this version to try when we got home to New Jersey. It's great, even though there isn't any mint as she wrote it out -- copied she said from a ship's galley owned by a tour company she works for from time to time.

Köfte Kebab (Meat balls)
6 servings

‘Meat balls’ does not adequately describe this wonderful Turkish favourite. The combination of the onion and parsley with the cumin is an East Mediterranean classic. The flat-shaped kebabs can also be cooked on a barbecue.

750 grams minced beef or lamb
1/2 teaspoon pepper
2 teaspoons cumin
1 teaspoon allspice
I egg
1 medium onion, finely chopped
1 clove crushed garlic (optional)
1/2 bunch of chopped parsley
Soft white bread–crumbs or flour

Put meat in a mixing bowl and add the spices, salt, pepper, egg, chopped parsley and bread-crumbs or flour. Knead with hands until well mixed (about three minutes.) Take walnut size chunks of the meat mixture and flatten into an oval-shaped kebabs in your hands. Fry in sunflower oil until cooked.

This dish is normally served with plain rice and a salad.

I personally love the kneading step, which she insisted should be five minutes or even longer.

Like Jenise and our guide, I used bulgur wheat, which is more authentically Turkish, but our guide said the recipe was meant for the tourist trade. Worked great in this tourist's home kitchen.

Best, Bob

PS -- I wonder what makes the Persian version Persian?

The word "Kofte" is the Persian word for "minced".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meatball

Thanks for the linguistic insights, Frank. I haven't travelled very much in Iran -- the Shah was still in power (barely) when last I visited Teheran. I don't remember meatballs there, although we make a number of Persian dishes here on a regular basis.

And thanks for the link to the Wikipedia article; in particular, thanks for the external down near the bottom of the page to http://www.turkishculture.org/pages.php ... D=11&ID=49

Gosh, reading that makes me want to book a seventh visit to Istanbul and one of my favorite places to visit:

Extract:

Many places in Turkey have a nationwide reputation for their kofte, such as Edirne, Inegöl, Tekirdag, Sultanahmet in Istanbul, Adapazari, Sanliurfa, Akçaabat and Adana (other places I have not enumerated will I hope forgive me for the omission), and you are sure to find a kofte shop at every step. That marvelous appetizing flavor draws you in the right direction like a magnet. Fried kofte are also unforgettable. As the plates of kofte with golden fried potatoes arrive at the table, every eye, nose and fork is turned in their direction. Cold kofte cooked the previous day are associated with school outings, excursions with friends, and family picnics, with the classical accompaniments of hard-boiled eggs, tomatoes, cucumbers, stuffed vine leaves, savory boreks and fruit.

If kofte are lightly fried, arranged in a baking dish with sliced potatoes and aubergines, a sauce of grated tomato cooked briefly in butter poured over, and baked in the oven, you have sahan kofte. If you mix your minced meat with rice instead of breadcrumbs, form the mixture into small balls, stew them in tomato sauce, and finally thicken the sauce with a liaison of a little flour and perhaps some lemon juice, you have eksili kofte, sulu kofte or Izmir kofte. For Sis kofte Gaziantep, Adana, Urfa or Aleppo style, threaded onto flat or angular skewers and grilled, the meat is not ground in a mincing machine but very finely chopped with a special knife, and then mixed with the particular combination of onion and seasoning used in each region. Whether mild or peppery, they go perfectly with a glass of tangy turnip juice.

In southern and southeastern Turkey, bulgur wheat is an essential ingredient of many varieties of meatball, above all the stuffed meatballs known as içli kofte with an outer shell of bulgur and minced meat and a filling of walnuts and spicy minced meat. Raw kofte are a specialty that requires top-quality meat without a trace of fat. This is then minced and kneaded with bulgur and the purplish hot pepper of the region, a task that requires skill, strength and patience to achieve perfect result. After eating four or five of these exquisitely flavored kofte you will be smoldering internally from the pepper, and the heat of the sun will seem mild in comparison! A quite different type of kofte has a name that is as memorable as its taste. Kadinbudu, or ladies' thighs kofte are prepared from a mixture of fried and raw minced meat with boiled rice, dipped in beaten egg and fried.

Reference: Tunca Varis/Skylife

Yeah, meatballs are good.

PS -- I wonder what makes the Persian version Persian?

Well, there is the NAME of the dish which is declined from a common Persian verb, and the fact that you can order it all over Iran.

I was going to type in the recipe but -- it has 22 ingredients and is rather complicated, so here is an online version

http://www.ichef.com/recipe.cfm/recipe/ ... peid/84232

In favor of the Turkish origin theory -- we have the fact that Tabriz is in northern Iran, in fact in eastern Azerbaijan. And the Azeris are Turks.

"Tabriz" carpets are an example of what I mentioned before, "Persian" carpets made by Turkic people.

This discussion touches on a rather huge phenomenon, the migration of Mongolian Turks westward. About 1000 years ago, there were speakers of "Iranic" languages ranging from the Ukraine eastward to Tibet. The cities of Khiva and Bokhara were Persian speaking for much of their existence. The "mongols" were part of the westward movement of the Turks, indeed today you can find Turkish boys named "Gengiz."

So we have Uzbekistan (Turks), Turkmenistan (Turks) and other "stans" north of Iran. The dominant language of Afghanistan is still Dari, which is a Persian dialect and Tajikistan where the people, interestingly, speak a form of Persian but write it with Cyrillic letters so it looks more like Russian.

The Turks entered the Lydian peninsula around 1000 AD and completed their conquest with the fall of Constantinople -- around the time that Columbus discovered America.

So every aggrandizement of the Turkish domain has meant a diminution of the Persian domain. And as I said, even within Iran, the Turks make up a very significant minority.

At any rate -- food reflects culture and the two can not be disentangled.

I love most Bokhara carpets - have a couple. And I still like meatballs despite all this silliness and pedantry.

I love most Bokhara carpets - have a couple. And I still like meatballs despite all this silliness and pedantry.

Hey man, I'm a professor, that's what I do. And you're welcome, for the history lesson.

I can't believe, even though you are a chef, that all you care about is how much salt to use and how long to cook it.

Don't you have any slight concern for the cultural background of foods??

Don't you have any slight concern for the cultural background of foods??

I'm sure Chef is just pulling your chain, Frank, but if not I've got your back.

Interesting history, and I found an interesting tidbit on the connection between rugs and meatballs [quoted for the fun of it, without checking facts]:

"Early recipes (included in some of the earliest known Arabic. Arab cuisine is defined as the various regional cuisines spanning the Arab World from Iraq to Morocco to Somalia to Yemen, and incorporating Levantine, Egyptian and others...) The cookbooks describe seasoned lamb rolled into orange-sized balls, and glazed with egg yolk and sometimes saffron. This method was taken to the west and is referred to as gilding, or endoring.

Many regional variations exist, notable among them the unusually large Iranian Kufteh, having an average diameter of 20cm (8")."

Thanks again, Bob

PS: we have a number of carpets from around the world, and made a fantastic acquisition in Ephesus on our visit in June -- wonderful carpet at a wonderful price. I met a collector in the shop who told me an interesting story.

He likes to hire painters to paint the back of turtles with a water soluable paint and then lets the crawl over his best carpets, adding a wonderful interplay of life to the carpet. B.

Well, from a purely emotional point of view -- I would imagine that the Persians would mind having "their" Kufteh called "Arab" food even more than they would mind it being labeled "Turkish".

But I'm not Persian and I don't know that for sure.

At any rate if you want to open a can of worms -- the foods served by Jews at Passover correspond closely to the foods served at the main Persian feast, Nowruz, which comes at the same time of year. And the Jews were kept in Persia for quite a long while, so the correspondence makes a lot of sense. And some of the foods transferred into the Christian celebration of Easter -- the name comes from Astarte. All of these feasts occur around March 21, plus or minus, and all of them are centered on eggs and herbs...

Lighten up, Frank. Been accused of pedantry many times myself. Although all I really care about is salt and cooking times.

Kofte is indeed a from Farsi verb کوفتن "kuftan" meaning "to beat, grind" (which also has the variant "kubidan", so one sometimes sees the word "kubide" also meaning minced meat). Much of what is called Arabic or Turkish haute cuisine is actually derived from Persian. As Kaj Öhrnberg and Sahban Mroueh write in their introduction to Ibn Sayyár al-Warráq's Kitáb al-Tabíkh, a 10th Century cookbook from Baghdad, "to the [Arab] conquerors it was total submission to the predominant cuisines and an abandonment of the old traditions" - understandable since the conquerors were coming from the lean deserts of Arabia to areas like Egypt and Persia with centuries of "haute" cuisine. The early Arabic cookbooks like that of Ibn al-Warráq are practically completely Persian - apart from the language they are written in. I haven't seen so much talk about the history of Ottoman cuisine, but simply by the name's etymology (Tk. köfte < F. kufte) and its ubiquity, it's safe to say, it is following from the Persian tradition.

Thanks for the insights, Otto. Were there Persian cookbooks in that era?

I haven't been able to find them; as you indicate, I found references to several written in Arabic, but none in Farsi.

Best, Bob

These have also found their way into Indian cuisine. The Indian version has a name that's usually transliterated into the Latin alphabet as "kofta". They exist in both meat and vegetarian forms. They are part of the mughlai cuisine that was introduced into the Indian subcontinent y the Mughal conquerors of the 1500s. The mughals were descendants of the Timurid Turkish conquerors of Iran, who originally came from Moghulistan ("land of the Mongols") in Central Asia. They took over in Iran from the descendants of Genghis Khan. Although they kept a Turkic language, culturally they were Persianized. They brought a lot of Turkic and Persian influences with them to India, including kofte/kofta.

-Paul W.

Timur is the Turkic warlord known as Tamerlane in the west. At its peak, the Timurids controlled all of Iran, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, as well as parts of Turkey, Iraq, Pakistan, and India. The Mughlais (Moguls) were nominally in charge of all of India from the 1500s until the British conquest. Persianized Timurids no doubt spread Persian cuisine such as kofte across their whole area of influence.

-Paul W.

Otto and Paul to the rescue!

It's not just cooking. Persian architecture, Persian art, Persian language, Persian culture completely saturated that part of the world, from Istanbul to Delhi. Ottoman art and literature was modeled on the Persian, the paintings were Persian miniatures and important documents were written in Persian, just as European documents were written in Latin up until about 1600. There was Persian architecture in southern Spain when the Arabs owned it. It is a little hard to convey -- it is kind of like the way Chinese culture saturated Japan and Korea despite ethnic and linguistic differences. Both Japanese and Korean cuisines contain many chinese dishes, and both languages contain many Chinese words.

I have a coin issued by the British East India Company in 1813. I can read it because it is in Persian.

A rose by any other name smells as sweet. So is it with the kofte or kebab, and tracing the origins of the dish by any name will lead only to frustration because throughout the history of the Balkans and the Middle-East recipes have crossed national borders far more easily than people. And in the end of course, each country declares the particular dish to be their own. In this case history equally supports the notion that the kofte originated in Turkey, Persia (Iran), and Bulgaria. I have also known serious historians from Syria, Egypt, and India who say that the kofte is theirs.

Best
Rogov

When I saw the title of this thread I immediately thought of Madhur Jaffrey's delicious cocktail koftas - or Chhote kofte - made with minced lamb - but these are Indian food so there is a lingual connection there too.

The recipe is from her book 'Indian Cookery' - but also online at
http://uktv.co.uk/food/recipe/aid/533993
and you can make the meatballs as small or as large as you like.

"Chote kofte" means "small koftas". "Chota" means "small".

-Paul W.