Katmer

As tradition built it

Makes 4. 30 minutes to stretch and fold, 10 to 12 minutes to bake.

Ingredients

• 300 g strong flour
• 200 ml water
• 100 g oil
• 1 tsp salt
• 200 g kaymak, full-fat and firm
• 150 g Antep pistachio, coarsely ground
• 60 g sugar
• 30 g, melted unsalted butter, for brushing

Method

1. Make a firm dough with the flour, water, oil and salt; rest, covered, for 30 minutes.
2. Divide into four portions and stretch each by hand, with the help of a little oil, to paper thinness, spinning and turning it in the air if possible.
3. Brush the stretched sheet lightly with an oil-butter mixture, then spoon kaymak, coarsely ground pistachio and sugar across the centre.
4. Fold the dough envelope-style from all four sides into the centre, enclosing the filling in a neat square parcel.
5. Bake at a preheated 200°C for 10 to 12 minutes, until golden.

Notes

Professional Gaziantep katmerci shops traditionally cook this on a large flat griddle (saj) rather than in an oven, a meaningfully different, more textured result than the home-oven adaptation above; this recipe gives the oven method as the one this chapter's research could source with real quantities, and names the griddle method as the closer, if harder to replicate at home, original.

What a modern chef changes

A dry, hot plancha, closer to the griddle a home oven cannot copy.

Rung 3

Method

1. Roll the dough through a pasta machine in stages for a more even, consistent thinness than most hand-stretching manages on a first attempt.
2. Cook on a dry, very hot flat cast-iron plancha or griddle plate on a Big Green Egg, rather than in an enclosed oven, genuinely closer to the professional saj method than the home-oven adaptation most written recipes default to.
3. Grind the pistachio in two textures: some fine, some left coarse, folded in together for a filling with both crunch and a fine background note.