Turkey: vegan lahmacun

Today’s stop on our vegan world tour brings us to Turkey where we cook a delicious vegan Turkish recipe. Here I have veganized the popular lahmacun, a thin crust Turkish pizza or flatbread. In place of the traditional meat, I made a paste from lentils and bulgur inspired by the vegan Turkish dish mercimek köfte. Read on to learn more about Turkish cuisine, mercimek köfte and lahmacun or jump straight to the recipe.

Turkish Cuisine

Turkey is a large country at the edge between the Mediterranean sea and Asia, in the lands between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. It has been the heart of both the Byzantine Empire and the Ottoman Empire ​[1], [2]​. These empires have ensured that the culture, including food, has flown throughout the region. In particular, the more recent Ottoman empire has had a profound influence on modern regional cuisine, bringing influences from neighboring countries into the Turkish kitchen and exporting Turkish dishes across the region ​[1], [2]​. In Turkey, Balkan cooking meets the Middle East and Central Asian cuisines.

Rice is a very important part of Turkish food. Wheat, in particular in the form of bulgur and flour are essential in most of Turkey while corn and corn flour is largely consumed along the eastern Black Sea shores where wheat is hard to cultivate ​[3]​. Vegetables like eggplant, spinach, sweet pepper, and zucchini are very important and featured in many plant-based dishes. Vegetables stuffed with different things like tomato, rice, or bulgur (and sometimes meat) are called dolma ​[4]​ and come in many varieties like eggplant, bell pepper, tomato, zucchini, and even as artichokes. If you ever went to a West Asian/Middle Eastern restaurant and ordered a plate of meze, chances are you were served the famous dolma yaprak sarma, wine leaves stuffed with rice. The fermented cabbage rolls, sarmale , we saw on our visit to Romania, is another type of dolma in the region.

Other vegetable dishes include vegetables cooked in large amounts of oil, such as imam bayildi (‘the fainting Imam’) a stuffed eggplant cooked in a lot of olive oil – comes with its own background story involving an Imam and a dowry of olive oil which was consumed way faster than anticipated ​[5]​. Legumes are also consumed in dishes like lentil soups, piyaz, a creamy white bean salad ​[6]​.

There are several baked savory dishes to be found in Turkey, such as gozleme (stuffed flatbread), pide (a type of flatbread topped with cheese), and börek (stuffed rolls of filo dough) ​[7]–[9]​. And of course, Turkey is world-renowned for its large variety of kebabs (mincemeat skewers) and köfte (meatballs).

Lahmacun

For our vegan recipe from Turkey, I decided to make Lahmacun, literally “dough with meat”. Lahmacun is a flatbread (related to pide above) usually topped with minced meat spiced with cumin, cayenne, cinnamon, and paprika ​[10], [11]​. While many vegan versions simply replace the minced meat with some vegan equivalent such as soy granules ​[12]–[15]​, or mushrooms and walnuts ​[16]​. I decided I wanted to make something that I felt was a bit more authentic. On the one hand, making my own topping will move my version further from the original meat but on the other hand, it might be more similar to what one could find in a Turkish kitchen a few decades ago (before vegan meat substitutes were found everywhere). In the end, I hope it will taste great! Here, I wanted to give lentils and bulgur a try as a replacement for the traditional minced meat. I hope that the cooked red lentils will give a creamy sauciness while fine-grained bulgur can give some contrasting texture. Ground walnuts will help add some depth of flavor.

I borrowed the lentil and bulgur combination from the vegan Turkish dish mercimek köfte (lentil ‘meatballs’) where lentils are cooked and mixed with uncooked bulgur, pureed tomatoes, onion, and spices like cumin, paprika and chili ​[17]–[19]​. Mercimek köfte also contains an array of fresh herbs like parsley, dill, and green onion but I decided to leave those out, to bring the flavor closer to lahmacun. For the köfte, the lentil and bulgur paste is squeezed into solid nuggets, often with imprints from the chef’s fingers. By making a köfte paste for my lahmacun toping, I can easily mix herbs into any leftover lentil paste and squeeze the paste into mercimek köfte and enjoy them on their own. Sounds like a good plan for leftovers.

Conclusion

I hope you’ll enjoy this vegan recipe from Turkey. To save time on the day you eat these lahmacun, you can make the topping the day before and you can try an overnight pizza dough – just make the dough below with cold water and 1-2 tsp yeast the day before and let rise in the fridge overnight.

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Lahmacun

Lahmacun are a kind of Turkish pizza. In this vegan recipe, I replaced the minced meat with a lentil and bulgur mix inspired by the vegan dish mercimek köfte from Turkey. Any leftover topping can be mixed with parsley and scallions and shaped into mercimek köfte.

Course Appetizer, Snack

Cuisine Turkish, West Asian

Keyword bulgur, flat-bread, lentils, pizza

Prep Time 30 minutes minutes

Cook Time 30 minutes minutes

proofing1 1 hour hour

Servings 4 servings

Ingredients

Dough – option 1

• 1 tbsp active dry yeast one 8g satchel
• 500 mL water
• 1300 mL all purpose flour
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tbsp olive oil

Dough – option 2

• 1-2 ball(s) store bought pizza dough

Topping

• 200 mL red lentils
• 200 mL fine grain bulgur
• 600 mL water
• ½ onion, grated
• 2 cloves garlic, pressed
• 2 tbsp tomato paste
• 1 tsp cumin
• 1 tsp paprika
• ½ tsp black pepper
• ½ tsp chili
• ½ tsp cinnamon
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• ½ tsp salt

Fresh toppings

• parsley, chopped
• red onion, sliced
• lemon wedges
• olive oil

Instructions

Dough

• Heat the water to 37°C (finger temp). Dissolve the yeast in some of the water.
• Add rest of water, salt and olive oil.
• Mix in four, a little at a time until a good dough texture is reached.
• Let rest for about 1 h, until doubled in size.

Topping

• Bring lentils to a boil in water with salt. Simmer for 10-15 minutes until the lentils start to break apart.
• Mix in the grated onion, pressed garlic, spices, olive oil, tomato puré, and bulgur.
• Cover and let rest for 15 minutes or longer (until dough has finished proofing).

  Taste some of the topping. The bulgur should become soft. You might have to add some more boiling water but wait a while first.
• Preheat the oven to ~260°C with a baking tray in the oven.

Assembly and baking

• When the dough has doubled in size after ~1 h, move it to a lightly floured work surface.
• Divide the dough into 4-8 balls, depending on what size you prefer (I found 6 to be good). Roll out one ball as flat as you can. Transfer to a piece of parchment paper.
• Spread a thin layer of the lentil and bulgur topping over the dough. You might have to add a little more water to make the topping easier to spread.
• Take out the warm baking sheet and slide the parchment paper onto it.
• Bake for ~10 minutes, until the lahmacun gets nice colour.
• Repeat for the other balls of dough.

Eating

• When the lahmacun are cool enough to handle, add parsley, sliced red onion and a squeeze of lemon. You can try other toppings like folive oil, resh tomatoes, cucumber, green onion and tahini as well.
• Roll up or slice into wedges and enjoy.