How to Make Turkish Ramadan Pide at Home: A Delicious Transformation into Easy Iskender Kebab

Today I want to teach you how to make this incredible smelling, crunchy and very soft inside pide. And afterwards together with Burak we're going to make something like an iskender. It's a recipe that I have made up when I was 15. So it's so easy to make so you guys can make it as well very very easily. Now Mr. Alpak the dough. Yes we are starting with the dough and to make it a bit quicker we are going to need lukewarm water. To do that I have around 300 milliliters of cold water and I'm adding some hot water in it. So make it 350. 350 okay. It has to be a little warmer than your finger. That's the heat. And that's how you feel it. This amount of water is needed for two ramazan pidesi. Yeah like we have the lukewarm water. I'm adding one tablespoon yeast into the water and one teaspoon sugar. When we use a dried yeast, dried yeast is sleeping and by adding it with water we wake it up. And the sugar helps the yeast to wake up with energy. When they wake up the first thing they want to do is eat and sugar helps to do that. You can add honey or molasses. That will work the same way. And I have 500 grams of flour and adding a teaspoon salt into that and mixing. And then I'm adding water in here. Taking every bit of it with a fork. I'm gonna add the flour into the water mixture until it gets thickened. It gets thickened. Now it's time for my hands. When it's thickened enough to touch I'm gonna knead it about 10 minutes until it gets smooth and elastic like every dough we make. When the dough is smooth divide the dough into two equal parts and let them rest in bowls until they double in size. While doing that cover them with a damp cloth so dough doesn't get dry. When the dough rises it's time to make this great pide. But the topping is really important and to do that I had a tablespoon of butter. I melted it. Now I'm going to add three tablespoon of water in it and I have two egg yolks. This is gonna make the top of the pide very very tasty. So to this egg yolks I add the butter and the water mixture and this is ready. And then we also need some nigella and sesame seeds and I put them on my side. To make the pide everything I need is here. I also need a baking paper. I crush it to give a nice shape then I put a bit of water to my counter. Why do I do this? For it to stick and stay like that. I want to enlarge the pide and how it's traditionally done is either with breadcrumbs or with some semolina. I love using semolina as well it's really nice. Today we have the breadcrumbs so this helps the dough to enlarge without sticking to the bottom. And then without losing the rise of the dough I am taking it out and putting it in the middle like this. I'm going to wet my fingers with the mixture and enlarge the dough. This way also my hands don't stick and the dough has this shiny and tasty surface. I'm going to try to make it as round as possible but it's not important if it's not in this great shape. Now the pinky fingers are really important. Again wet my pinkies with two of my pinkies like this and then make a round edge. When you make a bread the more surface area you have it's a better tasting thing. So what we're trying to do we're making some lumps and bumps and then we are going to make first straight lines. What I'm trying to do I'm really pressing with my finger to the bottom either make a square or a baklava shape. I think I like making squares Burak loves it with baklavas but you really have to press hard because eventually when it gets into the oven it's gonna rise again. We don't want it to be a normal looking bread but rather a pide. And then add some more egg mixture so that's even tastier. Some sesame seeds and nigella. They say that nigella is great. Nigella oil helps the cells of the person to heal. Finally just check whether every place of the dough has its share of the egg mixture and then when it's ready it's ready to go to the oven. I take it here you can take it with your hands if you like. I have something very nice here. I put the oven into 280 degrees and warm up the stone really well. Then when it gets in I turn it back into 250 because each time I open the door it gets colder and I want it to be like a really stone oven that these pides are cooked. So now this gets in and it's gonna cook about in 12 to 14 minutes. If you don't have a stone what you should do is put the pide at the bottom of the oven for about six to seven minutes then put it on to the highest rack. The oven is top and bottom without a fan. When there's a fan it's gonna get dry we don't want it we want it to be crunchy outside and warm at the inside. I want to talk a bit about pide tradition. Pide is a gorgeous gorgeous bread that is only done in the bakeries for one month. 11 months we don't do it and special just work one month a year and I don't know what they do in the rest of the year. The pide ustas start to make pide after three or four o'clock in the afternoon and there's a queue a long line actually in front of the bakeries every day because people want to eat freshly made just out of the bakery pide when they break their fast. The capitalist system normally says like if this is so successful in one month why not make it in 12 months but it's so good so great that we're not doing it. On the other hand because it's something we wait for a long time so it's so nice. Hope one day you come to Istanbul and experience this but this is a recipe that you will love and it's going to warm your house. There's nothing more heartwarming and housewarming than a freshly cooked bread and pide. So I think my pide is almost done. Burak when it's like a square it's perfect bites yes. It's so nice you can make a very nice pide sandwich. This recipe is inspired from the iskender kebab. What is iskender kebab? It's pide at the bottom a very nice tomato sauce and on top there is incredible döner. In some cultures it's called gyro and others shawarma but we love it as döner. Then there is the butter on top so nice. Okay it's hard to make döner etom. We have actually a recipe here if you want to make it like that it's so nice but much easily we can make with a bit of minced meat or even you can do it with chunks of meat. So I want to prepare the recipe starting from the bottom. I put some butter and Burak is gonna put making the mincemeat is very easy. On the channel we also have a recipe to make the perfect minced meat but I want to summarize it briefly for you. Put the double grinded minced meat on the pan with a lot of onions stir it on medium heat for a long time until the onions almost disappear and add some black pepper salt and nutmeg which makes it great. Now this is very much like a kebab. Some minced meat maybe you do at home might look not like this but more grayish. It's not because it's a different type of meat it's because you cook it a little less than it deserves in a way. So this way it becomes more kebab. Now each bread is getting its own share from the butter. To the butter we put some tomato puree, a bit of pepper, a bit of salt, a pinch of sugar to balance the acidity and I'm going to let this boil. This is going to be the tomato sauce. If your sauce is very thick you can add a bit of water and in here because there was some leftovers in the glass I don't want to lose it. I know in India there's a similar concept called bereket which is the mother of the concept of sustainability. In Anatolia maybe you know or we have bereket goddesses. We are the grandchildren of those. We believe that we shouldn't throw anything away. This is also a really good recipe for using the stale bread. If you have a stale bread cut it in squares and then wet it a bit and put it on the pan with a lot of butter and it becomes this gorgeous crunchy outside soft inside bread. I'm adding a couple of hot water to the yogurt so it doesn't cool down the iskender and loosens a bit. Now usually the iskender is served in oval plates. The breads are at the bottom. Then a bit of tomato paste and then some mincemeat and this yogurt. I did something different than what I normally do. Maybe a bit of parsley around. Finally a bit more tomato sauce. If you want you can some put fresh made butter on top but we shouldn't. No we shouldn't. I think summer is coming so no. This is a simple one that as I said when my father and mother was coming from work I wanted to please them and there was a bit of mincemeat in the fridge and I made this with the stale bread at home for the first time. So this is it guys. Another Ramazan has come. Thank you guys. Hope you enjoyed the pide. Know that in Turkey seven years ago I think when we looked online for a pide recipe there was nothing. So we went out to the bakery and worked together with them and developed this recipe. And then now there are tons but know that the origins of Turkish pide went viral through us. Yes we can say that. Take care. Bye bye.