Food: Gozleme.

When travelling, it is often street food that catches people’s hearts. In most places in the world, apart from the ones that specialise in drive-through fast food, the history, culture and flavours of any given region or country seem to be on best display in the offerings of street vendors.

These foods are a different form of fast food. The siting of the businesses and therefore rudimentary equipment used to produce the food means that it is easy to re-create these delights at home. It is also important to remember that a lot of these foodstuffs are destined for the bellies of the manual labourers and workers in often very poor areas. The food needs to be nutritious, but must also be fuel, often resulting in it being quite carbohydrate rich. When analysed through an economic, as opposed to culinary, lens it is obvious that it is very cheap to produce. Produced cheaply, sold cheaply, where volume is king. And with volume there needs to be brevity of process to make the whole thing work.

With none of this in mind, stuck in the banality of another lockdown, I decided to clean my freezer out. Always a bit of a surprise exercise, with stories that can’t or perhaps shouldn’t be told, but there were some gems in there. What prompted this discussion was a couple of packets of frozen lamb mince. When serving lamb in the restaurant, I procure whole wether lambs from the farmer over the back from me. This process means that I am compelled to use every single skerrick of the beast. Often I will braise the breast meat, but I must have had the mincer out at some stage and decided to mince the breast meat and all the trim. On defrosting, I realised it was a pretty coarse and vulgar product. I wasn’t convinced that it would be suitable but gave it a go anyway.

I wanted to re-create something that I missed from my visits to the Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne. The wonderful Borek Shop, a classic Turkish street food vendor transplanted into the halls of our own QVM. Try as I might, I couldn’t find a recipe that looked like what I remembered, so I settled on gozleme. I was not convinced that my coarse lamb was going to work, but I proceeded. What struck me most when researching recipes was the brevity of the cooking of the lamb; for some reason I was expecting a long slow process akin to a bolognaise, but no. It made me even more nervous about my mince, but I shouldn’t have worried. I should have thought it through a little more: of course this was the perfect use for the trim and the offcuts; it’s exactly what a Turkish street vendor would have used. I have also included a spinach filling for those who don’t eat meat.

If you’re missing travelling and finding these sorts of gems along the way, start recreating them at home. It is a very uplifting experience.