Iraqi Kebab

Iraqi kebab — kabab iraqi, or simply kabab on any Baghdad street — is the minced lamb-and-beef skewer that anchors Iraq's grill culture. It shares an ancestor with the Turkish Adana and the Syrian kebab halabi, but Iraq took the recipe in a distinct direction: less chilli heat, far more parsley, and a hard commitment to fat from the tail rather than from the shoulder.

It is street food and family food at the same time. The kebabchi shops of Baghdad, Mosul and Basra grill it in the open over long channel grills, and the same mixture appears at home over a small mangal on a Friday. Its inseparable partner is amba, the tart fermented mango pickle that arrived through the Indian Ocean trade and became more Iraqi than Indian. Iraqi Jews later carried it to Israel, and today it dresses shawarma in Israel and Palestine and goes into the sabich sandwich.

The mixture is worked, not mixed. Minced lamb and beef, grated onion squeezed bone dry, a great deal of finely chopped flat-leaf parsley, and baharat go into a bowl and are kneaded by hand until the texture changes and the mass starts to cling to itself in one piece. That stickiness is structural — it is the only thing keeping the meat on a flat skewer over live fire, since Iraqi kebab uses no egg and no breadcrumb.

Wide flat skewers are not a stylistic choice either. A round skewer lets the meat rotate freely and drop; a flat one grips it. The mixture is pressed along the skewer with a wet hand in a long ribbon, ridged slightly with the fingers so the surface catches the heat unevenly and chars in bands. It cooks fast and close to the coals — three or four minutes a side, turned once, and off before the fat has finished running.

The classic ratio is roughly two parts lamb to one part beef, with the fat coming from lamb tail fat worked into the mince at about a quarter of the total. If tail fat is unavailable, use fatty lamb shoulder and accept a slightly different mouthfeel — what you must not do is compensate with vegetable oil, which will simply run out into the fire. Parsley is a bulk ingredient here, not a herb garnish: a large bunch to half a kilo of meat is normal.

Salt and black pepper carry the seasoning, with only a pinch of baharat, which in Iraq leans warm rather than hot — allspice, cinnamon, coriander, a little cumin. Aleppo-style pepper adds colour and a mild fruity heat. If you want the amba, buy it rather than make it; the jarred Iraqi and Israeli brands are the same product the shops use.

It comes off the skewer onto flat samoon or khubz, never a plate first, with grilled tomatoes and long green peppers cooked alongside on their own skewer. Raw onion with sumac, a spoon of amba, and a scatter of more parsley finish it. In Baghdad it is eaten with the bread as both plate and cutlery, and the fat soaking into the underside of the loaf is the point, not an accident.