My First "Turkish Pizza"

The guidebooks say Gaziantep is famous for its pizza, Lahmacun. Actually, the base is just a white flour tortilla. However, it's shaped like a large oval, about 16 inches long. They smear it with a mixture of some sort of ground meat and spices. The one we got tonight was highly spiced, but apparently that's not always so. Also, in some places they give you fresh parsley to add. You fold it in half and eat away.

We got our Lahmacun just down the street. There's a little complex containing a neighborhood market that reminds me of the Korean markets in Manhattan, a bakery and a meat market. They all seem to work together. When we ordered the Lahmacun in the bakery, one of the young men took us to the meat market. A guy in the meat market scooped out a meat mixture and put it into a plastic bag. We took that back to the bakery. They have a huge wood fired oven that is used for a variety of things. While our Lahmacun were baking, they were baking pita -- not the pocket-style pita but the kind you get at the Continental in the U District. They had two paddles that must have been four feet long. The baker could really slip those pitas in and out. But the most interesting thing is that people brought in things to be baked. As we were leaving someone was bringing in what looked like a chicken-pineapple casserole. There were at least six round or rectangular pans with yummy looking dishes, most containing tomatoes and eggplants. So it looks like we may not be the only ones in these apartments without ovens. And it certainly is a sensible thing. Why fire up an electric oven when there is one across the street that's kept going most of the day. A large neighborhood over sounds like a good thing to me.