Shish Kebab

Şiş simply means skewer in Turkish, and şiş kebabı is the plainest and oldest idea in the entire family: meat on a metal rod over fire. Its written history in Anatolia goes back to the Ottoman kitchen, and its practical history goes back much further, to nomadic Turkic cooking where a sword or a rod was the only equipment available.

Because it is the most portable idea in this atlas, it travelled further than any other kebab. Every cubed-meat skewer from the Balkans to Central Asia to the American backyard descends from the same format, and the English word shish kebab entered the language through Ottoman Turkish before spreading worldwide as the generic term for meat on a stick.

All four other skewers in this group start from this one: three-centimetre cubes of lamb shoulder or leg, a short onion-juice and olive-oil marinade, flat metal skewers and grey, glowing coals for eight to twelve minutes. Cop Shish shrinks the meat to thumbnail nuggets of lamb and fat on thin wooden sticks. Chicken Shish (Tavuk Shish) uses thigh meat in yogurt and tomato paste over a gentler fire. Shishcheta and Shish Kebab (North American) put peppers and onion on the meat skewer, something Turkish grill houses avoid by giving vegetables their own; the Bulgarian version runs on pork and savory, the American one on beef or chicken.

Compare: Cop Shish · Chicken Shish (Tavuk Shish) · Shishcheta · Shish Kebab (North American)

Cubed meat, unlike minced kebab, has nowhere to hide. The marinade does two jobs — tenderising with acid or dairy, and carrying flavour into the surface — but the real work happens in the cutting and the threading. Cubes should be roughly the same size, around three centimetres, and they should be threaded with a little air between them, so the sides brown too while the insides stay short of well done.

The fire matters more here than in any minced kebab. Coals should be glowing and grey, not flaming, and the skewers sit close enough that a cube takes eight to twelve minutes in total with regular quarter-turns. Fat cubes threaded between the lean ones are the traditional basting system, and they work better than any brush.

Lamb shoulder or leg is the classic; beef sirloin or rump works and is common in Turkish restaurants that serve both. The cut must have some intramuscular fat — lean fillet is a waste here, because it has nothing to render and dries out in the last two minutes. If you like, ask the butcher for a piece of lamb tail fat to thread between the cubes.

The marinade should be short and simple: grated onion juice, olive oil and pepper, sometimes a spoon of yoghurt or tomato paste, with the salt held back until just before grilling. Long acidic marinades break the surface into mush. Two to four hours is plenty; overnight is already too much if there is lemon in it.

It arrives on a bed of flatbread that soaks the juices, with grilled tomato and long green pepper, sumac onions and parsley. Bulgur pilav or rice sits alongside, and a bowl of cacık or plain yoghurt cools the plate. In a full mixed grill it shares the platter with minced Adana and chicken şiş, which is how most Turkish restaurants expect you to order it.