Variations of Meat - something unknown but tasty
If you have left yourself enough appetite after the starters, then the main meat course will follow. The traditional dish is Meatballs, which consists of a huge number of grilled burgers of different sizes, prepared with different spices and other additional ingredients, for example with cheese and with vegetable.
Also typical, and very tasty, is a platter of mixed grills with lamp cutlets, kidney and liver.
A little hint: save some of the starter dips as sauces for the main course.
Restaurants specialising in meat dishes are called Ocakbasi. Similar to the Japanese Sushi-bars, you can see the meat being grilled on an open charcoal fire. The favourite kebap is called cöp shish, consisting of small pieces of meat on a skewer served with pide bread, onion and tomato. The most famous world-wide is the shish kebap, made from lamb, beef or veal. As a tourist, you should ask for the speciality kebaps of the region you are in, offered by all the Ocakbasi and meat restaurants.
In Adana you will get spicy Adana kebap, a mixture of ground meat with herbs grilled on a skewer. A little milder is Urfa kebap. Iskender kebap, named after the Iskenderlglu family (the originators) from Bursa, is a speciality made from sliced pide bread, slices of döner meat, hot tomato sauce, yoghurt and brown butter. Lots of kebaps are cooked in the oven (firin), for example, lamptandir (a joint), which is cooked until the meat breaks into pieces; and kagit kebap, a lamb dish wrapped in paper with thyme, onion and garlic.
Güvec dishes are done in small pots of clay; for example, lamb güvec, cooked with small okras, tomatoes and green peppers or shrimps, and güvec cooked in a light tomato sauce and baked with cheese. Tscherkessen chicken is a creamy dish of chicken meat in a walnut sauce, named after the creamy white skin of the Tscherkassian wives of the sultans in their harems.
It is now up to you to decide which of these variations of meat dishes you want to enjoy.
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