Every culture has dishes that are for the more adventurous at heart. And an outsider may become queasy at the thought of eating something that the locals gobble up. My first step-father, whom I usually refer to as “Middle Dad”, was of German decent and he enjoyed the occasional jar of pickled pig’s feet. There’s your case in point.
Another example of this is something that I have referred to before, probably because I just cannot get over the grossness of it: kokoreç. It’s sauteed animal intestines. You needn’t exactly have gone to medical school to know what function the intestines serve. I was brave enough to try it once, mind you. It tasted like dirt, and I had a hard time getting the following word out of my head, “gastrointestinal”. Ewww and ewww and ewww again.

Çiğ köfte (chee kuhf-tay) is another Turkish delicacy that is not for the faint of heart. After all, the name literally translates to “raw meatball”. I avoided çiğ köfte for a good long while.

It’s not that I wasn’t curious. I was just waiting for my body to completely settle in. Anyone who has ever lived in a very foreign culture knows that the body goes through some severe adjustments. I suffered from gastrointestinal woes for the first year and a half of living here in Turkey.
It’s not that it’s a dirty third world country; albeit I think the health standards may be slightly more lax than in States. But there was a whole world of bacteria waiting here for me that my body had never experienced before. I even got a bacterial infection in my lower intestine from skinny-dipping in the Aegean Sea! So, it needn’t even come from food or drink, it can come from showering or swimming. It’s a fact of life. But I thought that if I was going to take the plunge with something like raw meat, better to wait until things calmed down in my body. And I am glad that I waited because when the time came, mine was made by a “master”. Çiğ köfte is considered a regional specialty of Southeastern Turkey. The boyfriend’s mother is from Diyarbakır, a city of this region, and one could say that çiğ köfte-making is in her blood. In other words, she doesn’t mess about! Recently, we had the boyfriend’s parents over for iftar (the meal that breaks the fast during Ramadan) and because Turkish mothers cannot just sit (like ever!), she volunteered to make some.

Maybe you have been brave enough to try steak tartare? That’s the general idea at the start. The base is a specially-prepared ground beef that is removed of all fat and blood and is rendered to almost a paste. The meat is kneaded up further still by hand. People usually use gloves for this project as very firey spices enter the mix soon enough. However, the boyfriend’s mother was hard core enough to make it sans gloves.

specially prepared mincemeat

It’s easiest to manipulate when made in a shallow dish of some sort. The next step is to add a bulgur mixture that has been soaked beforehand with water and chopped onions until the blugur has softened. After the bulgur has been mixed in, tomato paste and even a bit of pepper paste is added. A true çig köfte features a particular spice called isot. It is a special dried pepper, almost black and similar to paprika. The boyfriend’s mother had a small parcel of it that was grown by her mother in her Eskişehır garden. As soon as she opened the package, I sneezed and had to back away. She sprinkled it liberally into the mix.

happy hands make for happy köfte

The last step is to add chopped green onion and parsley. Once the green has been added, the patties are casually manipulated with the palm of the hand leaving finger-shaped imprints.

perfect patties

The most traditional method of eating involves wrapping a pattie in a crisp leaf of lettuce and sprinkling with lemon juice, and lastly, savoring the fire.

dynamite comes in small packages

Because çiğ köfte scorches the tongue so, it’s handy to have ayran (drink made with thinned yogurt and salt) at the ready for dampening the heat.

As with so many things around here, there is a story about the coming of çiğ köfte. It is believed that during the time of Abraham, Nimrod gathered up all of the firewood around the area of Urfa (a city in Southeastern Turkey) to build an execution pyre. An industrious hunter’s wife looked for some way to prepare raw venison. She decided upon mixing the meat with bulgur and spices with a mortal and pestel until it was an appropriate texture.

we heart raw meat!

If you make too much, as we definetly did, do not dispair. It can later be dipped in beaten egg and fried up like regular köfte. We did so for lunch and it was ummm ummm good!

breakfast and lunch portions of iftar dinner